Heroku - does it support HTTP Live Streaming?

Question

I have a Rails 4 application that is deployed by Heroku servers. To serve videos (stored on Amazon S3 servers), I've decided to implement HTTP Live Streaming. While any web server can be configured for HTTP Live Streaming, does anybody know if Heroku servers have been set up to support Apple's adaptive bitrate streaming solution?

For more info, see "Configuring a web server" at the following -https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/networkinginternet/conceptual/streamingmediaguide/DeployingHTTPLiveStreaming/DeployingHTTPLiveStreaming.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40008332-CH2-SW3

Thanks!

Answer 1

As it turns out, Heroku servers do allow for HTTP Live Streaming.

Answer 2

Here's a good SO answer that describes how HLS works. You'll notice that there's nothing special about the files involved; just a playlist of video segments at different bitrates and the client decides which segment at which bitrate to load. These video files and associated playlist file can be stored and accessed directly from S3, or any other basic web server for that matter.

You do have to encode the different streams, but this can be done locally, on your server, or through some other service like Amazon Elastic transcoder, and it only has to be done once per video file.