Based on years of experience in network transmission, quality monitoring, SDK development, and analysis of real-time quality statistics, Agora now provides developers with Agora FLS, a standard protocol CDN live streaming service. Agora FLS, together with Agora Media Service, offers a CDN live streaming solution with an optimal playback experience to ensure the ultimate end-to-end user experience. This service supports various live streaming scenarios, such as social media applications, e-commerce, sporting events, and online education.
Features
Multiple protocols for stream injecting
- Standard protocols: You can push streams to the Agora service by RTMP, RTMPS, QUIC, or SRT protocol, and Agora also supports pulling streams from the origin by RTMP, HTTP-FLV, or HTTP-HLS protocol.
- Agora protocols: You can also push streams to the Agora service by Agora private protocols through the Agora RTC SDK or the OBS plug-in.
Stream distribution
You can distribute streams in various media formats, including RTMP, RTMPS, HTTP-FLV, and HTTP-HLS, and by several transport protocols, including HTTP, SRT, and QUIC.
Stream processing
- Transcoding: Transcode audio or video streams using preset or custom templates. You can also use a narrow-bitrate encoder.
- Screenshotting: Take a screenshot of the cover or other contents of a stream with customized configurations.
- Content moderation: Moderate a stream in real time.
- Watermarking: Add watermarks to a stream.
Cloud recording
You can record a stream with customized configurations in various formats, such as HLS, MP4, and FLV.
Security
- Authenticate the URL address of a stream by token.
- Set IP blacklists and whitelists.
- Use the HTTP Referer Header to prevent hotlinking.
- Based on the network and playback quality data collected by Agora SDKs, Agora FLS helps you route towards the most suitable data center through APIs or DNS.
- There is support for both mid-stream performance-based switching and multi-sub-manifest distribution.
Traceability
You can view the complete end-to-end quality statistics of a stream in Agora Analytics.
Advantages
- Agora implements real-time routing based on large amounts of real-time quality statistics from the SDKs and experience in real-time processing to provide this massively scaled CDN service.
- Having deeply understood networks in RTC and relentlessly improved the routing algorithm, Agora has formed a real-time performance-based system starting from error spotting, fast node switching, slow node recovering, to node scoring.
- Agora provides routing APIs that you can call to improve the stability of your services.
Global coverage
- Agora has partnered with a group of carefully selected, high-quality CDN service providers from around the world, making sure you can access multiple service providers regardless of location and telecom carrier.
- Having upgraded Agora Media Service, Agora now provides partners with standard interfaces so that they do not need to worry about details such as conversion, transcoding, and media processing. Meanwhile, developers are provided with a standard configuration and media stream format.
- When the host and the audience of a live stream are in different regions, the stream is automatically accelerated through media services powered by SD-RTN™, a superior real-time engagement network developed by Agora, ensuring the best cross-region streaming quality.
Auto-adjusted switching
- The Agora SDK provides multiple intelligent stream switching strategies, so you can make adaptive changes to transmission protocols, bitrates, and service nodes according to the network conditions.
- Agora FLS is optimized for FLV and HLS protocols to improve the developer experience:
- Supports smooth bitrate and node switching for the FLV protocol.
- Supports automatic mid-stream switching for the HLS protocol.
Full-path traceability
- You can view all the quality statistics of the end-user client in Agora Analytics. There is both a global view and a specific view showing the status of each stream and playback.
- Agora Analytics also displays the stream data on the server side in real time, clearly reflecting the quality and status of each stream as it flows among Agora services.
Diversified APIs
- You can call the RESTful API to enable or configure all functions on your server.
- You can use callbacks to get notification messages for multiple Agora services, such as streaming, transcoding, recording, and screenshotting.
Full scenario support
Agora provides a modifiable SDK integrated with real-time communications, streaming, and music playback, with which you can build and switch among scenarios such as real-time audio and video communication, as well as CDN live streaming.
Instant use
You can implement Agora FLS in one of the following ways:
- For instant use, generate and configure a real-time address group through the application’s interfaces.
- For business separation, use independent domain names assigned by Agora.
- Use your own domain names.
Supported protocols
See the following table for the protocols supported by Agora FLS:
Protocol |
Stream injection |
Playback |
RTMP |
✔ |
✔ |
RTMPS |
✔ |
✔ |
HTTP-FLV |
✔ |
✔ |
HTTP-HLS |
✔ |
✔ |
HTTPS-FLV |
✔ |
✔ |
HTTPS-HLS |
✔ |
✔ |
RTMP over QUIC |
✔ |
✔ |
HTTP over QUIC |
✔ |
✔ |
RTMP over SRT |
✔ |
✔ |
Agora Private Transmission Protocol |
✔ |
✔ |