Updates for the week 32 - 2022
Improvement
Concurrent viewer chart can now track the viewers watching from your HLS link (not just viewers from our player anymore).
Improvement
Admin in your Team can now manage Billing of the account.
Weekly Updates
Schedule livestreams' recordings
New
Just finish your livestream and want to replay the livestream? You can now schedule the livestream's recorded file to be played from your embed player or any social platforms. Check out how to use it here.
Teams Feature
New
*Available for All in One - Premium and above
The Team feature lets you invite your team members and assign them a role. Together, you and other team members can view and manage your streams and videos on Castr. There are three different roles on the team-Owner, Admin and Moderator (coming soon).
Admins even have access to upgrade packages, meaning in case of someone's absence, the stream will be unaffected as Admin can make the necessary upgrades.
To add team members to your team, go to your account, and navigate to the Teams tab. Click on Invite Admin button and follow the prompts to send invitation. Upon accepting the invitation, your team member can view your streams.
RTMP Backup Ingest: Keep Your Livestream Continue
New
*Available in the Livestream 5TB plan and above
By enabling the RTMP Backup Ingest, you can simultaneously stream primary and backup live video feeds. In case your primary stream fails, Castr will immediately switch to your backup stream, so that your live broadcast can continue without interruption.
This is a failsafe solution that makes sure your stream is up and running even when there's a technical malfunction.
Enable this feature by switching the Enable Backup URL toggle in your dashboard. You will find a Primary RTMP URL and a Backup RTMP URL to configure in your encoder.
Learn more in this article
Updates in Livestream Analytics: New Metrics for Deeper Insights
Improvement
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
Updates in Castr Video Player
Improvement
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.
VOD Bucket available in Livestream plan
New
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.
Turn streams to on-demand videos with “Live to VOD”
New
*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:
SRT URL available in Livestream plans (beta)
New
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.
Upload video files via Dropbox or Google Drive
New
For Scheduler and VOD bucket, you can now connect Castr to your Dropbox and Google Drive and import files directly.