Interesting post! The author mentions that the first step was to "receive this input and to generate HLS output to a known folder". I have a couple questions about this step: 1: Did they re-encode the input? Or just repackage it? 2: I'm unfamiliar with EvoStream, but if it is ingesting RTMP and outputting HLS, why did Globo need to bother generating an HLS manifest? Couldn't they just use the one EvoStream created?
I am glad you liked. I am not the author of the blog post, but I was a member of the team. 1: We just repackage it. 2: The problem is that EvoStream stores the manifests and chunks locally and we needed high availability. That's why we use an external data storage. We have had up to 30 simultaneous streams, with 7 bitrates each and 2 hours of DVR.
When our CDN was very crowded, one tag on the HLS playlist was able to direct users to a lower quality, preventing all the users to fight for the same bandwidth and avoiding rebuffering events.