We added some new metrics in the Livestream Analytics. With these intuitive updates, you can measure the performance and evaluate the effectiveness of your streams.
New metrics:
Visitor Overview
Real-time Visitor Count
Real-time Map
Visitors per Country
Visitors per City
New capabilities:
Time selection: choose the time range you want to view
Export data into multiple formats: CSV, XML, HTML, TSV, JSON, and RSS
Export data as images
We made some new enhancements to the Castr HTML5 player:
Thumbnails on seeking: Hover over the seek bar (or progress bar) to see the preview of the video at seeked time. A must-have for easy video navigation.
Visual timeline: A filmstrip-inspired navigation bar at the bottom of the video shows you the thumbnails of different frames of your video.
Playback memory: If you close the video and come back later, it will continue where you left off.
These improvements reflect on all videos in VOD Buckets and Live to VOD converted files. You may access these features in the Livestream plans.
If you’re a current user of the Livestream plan, you can now enjoy our VOD Bucket feature. This feature enables you to:
Upload videos as VOD (video on demand) files
Embed them to any website with the embed URL or iFrame snippet
To access, go to your dashboard and click on the VOD Bucket tab in the top navigation bar.
*Available in Livestream plans as for now.
We replaced the old Recording tab with Live to VOD and added some cool new functions:
Auto-record: Castr will automatically record your videos as soon as they go live. You don’t have to turn the recording mode on and off.
Turn a recorded file into a VOD (video on demand) file, with an embeddable HTML5 player link and iFrame snippet.
Save videos to your local computer as .mp4 files.
Read more:
We’ve added an option to stream with the SRT protocol in the Livestream plans (beta).
SRT is an open-source streaming protocol that offers sub-second latency for live videos. SRT was proven to run 12 times faster than the RTMP protocol, and can deliver reliable streams over unreliable network connections.
You can also get the SRT URL in Castr’s Multistream plans.
Learn more in our blog here.
For Scheduler and VOD bucket, you can now connect Castr to your Dropbox and Google Drive and import files directly.
You can now use SRT URL instead of RTMP URL to connect from your encoder (OBS, Wirecast…) to Castr for a more stable connection and reduced latency.
We no longer support Smashcast as one of our platforms from 19 Nov 2020. If you need to connect to Smashcast, you can use our custom RTMP option to do so.
You can now chat with your audience while using Castr Player for livestreaming on your website. Head to our blog to learn more.
We implemented multiple DNS level failover locations for all our ingest points, your streams are safe with us now. If one of our ingests fails you will be routed to our failover server and the stream will continue without any issues, and this feature is available for all our users.
