Streaming an analog TV signal in a website

Question

a local news channel wants to stream their signal on their website, and also they want to take advantage of the Pre-Roll ad system (OTT).

I've made some research and this might be achieved using JWPlayer Pro and Wowza as a streaming service, but i'm having trouble regarding the initial setup, and how to convert the analog signal to digital (this needs to be done in a different office, using a TV).

I would really appreciate any feedback from people that might have already tried this before.

Answer 1

I am doing streaming from a pleathora of sources as part of my work. This job is easy.

• Since you are talking about an analog signal, it is SD and as such needs far less horespower to handle
• To digitize, use a $10,- USB video digitizer from China. Better: Use two of them and set up redundant paths.
• Use FFmpeg to convert this digitized stream into a HLS live playlist to be served via plain HTTP(S)
• Use mediaelement.js to deliver to the browser with minimal setup.
• For preroll use a simple PHP script, that replaces the first few entries in the live playlist with the segments of the preprocessed ads - here you can also implement ad selection.

Now for the gotchas:

• FFmpeg has a bug, that will stall the stream after a bit over 44 days. Make sure to restart it once per month (You can use your dual redundant paths to mask if that is a problem)
• The al-cheapo USB digitizers work very reliably, but if they really go down you must unplug and reinsert them (or face strangeness)
• Ubuntu 18.04 has all widely-used drivers ootb, but you might want tomake sure first.
• Do not use a RasPi, it has barely enough horsepower. Use something a bit (need not be much) more powerfull
• Turns out the ads (files you do not control) are most often much less easy to deal with than the stream (which you do control). Prepare a good workflow for preparation of those