Wowza wants to bring more video to the iPhone (and elsewhere)

If you’re a web video company, you’ve got to choose which video format or formats you’re willing to support. It’d be nice if your video could just work with whatever player the user has installed, but that can get pretty expensive. Enter Wowza Media Systems, a company that promises to make the process cheaper and easier.
With the latest version of its media server, which made it through testing last week, Wowza says its customers can now stream video to the warring video formats of Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, while also supporting video on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Previously, the company says, you’d need to buy an Adobe server to stream Flash, a Microsoft server to stream Silverlight, build more infrastructure for the iPhone, and so on. Now it’s possible to stream to all of those formats from a single file.
Wowza chief executive and co-founder Dave Stubenvoll says companies are particularly interested in the iPhone support. There may be a lot of iPhones out there, but for now the audience is still small compared to the overall web population. So a forward-thinking company may want to support iPhone video, but it would be hard to justify the expense. For example, when Wowza customer Livestream did a live broadcast of a Foo Fighters concert in October, Stubenvoll says that without his company’s server, Livestream would “never would have been able to afford” streaming to iPhones.
“The reaction that we’re getting from folks is, ‘This is the way it should have been done,’” Stubenvoll says. “Audiences shouldn’t be constrained by the flavor of client you support.”
There are still some costs involved in supporting multiple formats, such as building a separate player for the Flash and Silverlight videos. Still, Stubenvoll says the costs go down dramatically. Wowza Media Server 2 costs $995 per server, which is already substantially cheaper than Adobe’s $4,500 server, and companies can lower the upfront costs even further by just paying $65 per month.
Stubenvoll says Evergreen, Colo.-based Wowza was founded in 2005 and has been fully profitable since 2008. It never had to raise any funding, even though the founding team had an office with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, because Stubenvoll and his co-founder were able to keep things running using operating revenue.