Streaming Media Forums

I am working with a start-up that needs video chat capabilities. I am leaning towards using the Wowza streaming server, but I am a bit confused about my options for quality of the video chat.

From the research I have done it seems that if I use flash I am stuck with skype quality audio and video. While this is OK, I would prefer to have a higher quality solution. Is it even possible to have a relatively high quality video chat (closer to Hulu's streaming quality)? I strongly prefer that no download is required, but a plugin download would be acceptable (like google's video chat).

have you considered http://www.oovoo.com ?

Forgive me if I am pointing out what you may already know, but on demand video like Hulu is encoded very differently than real time low latency video chat or video conferencing. The biggest difference is in the buffering time and Variable vs Constand bitrate (VBR vs. CBR) or even one passs vs two pass encoding. These technolgies trade latency for quality.

That said - I would also be interested in knowing who is doing the best job with the standard or proprietary low latency codecs that are out there. On the Flash front I've heard that Sorenson has advanatages for vidoe chat over the higher quality VP6 and H.264 codecs. But I've also heard of encoding appliances using H.264 for video conferencing.

You should take a look at the jeeCam Flash Server:
http://www.jeecam.de/elearning.html

The server is able to deliver videochat in hd-resolution.parameters of resolution (e.g 640 x 720 or higher) and protocol (rtmp or rtmpe) must be settled within the flash frontend of your application.