We are sometimes asked:
Does Bitmovin’s Live Encoder support Live-to-VOD (Live to VOD or Live2VOD) workflows?
The answer is - yes it does and here is a brief explanation of how it works.
When talking about Live-to-VoD generation, what Bitmovin does specifically is the generation of a VoD manifest or playlist which contains references to the segments already generated - or to be generated, for the live stream. In this way, when we trigger the Live-to-VoD workflow, we are basically creating a new VoD manifest while keeping the original live encoding workflow untouched. Since Bitmovin is not re-encoding neither repackaging the live content but just creating a new manifest pointing to the proper live segments, the Live-to-VoD process is really fast, making it possible to have a new VoD manifest available in matter of seconds. Additionally, Bitmovin Live-to-VoD workflow makes it possible to define what portion of the main live event needs to be included in the VoD manifest.
As with any other manifest creation process supported by Bitmovin, we support a fully manifest customization - so new manifests can even differ from the original one, for instance, some renditions may be omitted, new periods could be added or new manifest type (HLS or DASH) could be created, etc.
Common use cases
- Recording full live events - A full live event could be recorded as a VoD content. Additionally, customers are able to trim the content in order to remove unnecessary segments for the very beginning or the end of the transmission.
- Highlighting content - Several highlights can be created from a live stream while the live event is still active, for instance to share clips or generate highlights from Sports events, News, Concerts, etc. Each highlight or clipping would be considered new VoD content, so in practice, the customers can create as many highlights as they need.
- Creating VoD chapters - Some live events may be splitted into smaller pieces such as chapters to better organize how the content will be stored and consumed once the event finishes. Each chapter could be considered a new VoD content.
Follow this post for future information and a link to a how-to guide that will include more information, API calls and sample code snippets.