Video Streaming

[a13wes]

Hi Guys,

I'm looking to broadcast a live 60 minute conference/webinar, It'll be streamed to no more than 500 viewers, probably with a low quality & high quality stream.

Is there any tips anyone can recommend for setting this up?

I've been looking at hosting etc, as I know it can be very bandwidth intensive. I have found a hosting company that normally offers shoutcast and game server services (So I would assume their servers would be capable?) and was thinking that a package with 40gb transfer a month would be more than suffice, however I have asked them if their servers would be up to the task.

Is there anything else I should be taking into consideration?

For a setup.. I have a camera man and sound technician, so was thinking a macbook pro set up with an application such as quicktime media server to broadcast to a http address? The internet connection is 300k+.

Is this the best way to achieve this or am I missing something?

[TimT]

[quote='a13wes' pid='11023' dateline='1256638550']
Hi

From experience I suspect that you are likely to hit problems (excuse me for stating the obvious but.....with live you only get one shot).

If you are talking about 500 concurrent viewers, assuming a regular hosting co will suffice is very dangerous. When you read the small print you typically find that whilst the SLA states 40Gb of transfer, it won't be provisioned to be used in a single 1hr chunk... (more like an aggregate shared by multiple customers over the month)

For delivery you would typically be better of using a CDN designed for live traffic (do contact me off list).

For encoding you would reduce the risk of problems by using a hardware encoder rather than a Macbook & delivering the stream in Flash or wmv. This will enable you to serve a high number of both PC & MAC viewers without getting bogged down in tedious support issues.

Lastly the IP connection to the streaming servers..... Ideally you should have a non contended link as contention in ADSL lines is one of the most common oversights associated with unsuccessful webcasts. Where dedicated bandwidth is not available we typically use IP satellite links with CIR set approximately 20% above the streams bit rate e.g. get a 600K CIR if you are streaming at 512K. Depending on which part of the world the event is being produced we may be able to point you in the direction of IP satellite provider (off list)

Good Luck!