How to stream video from a web server?

[Greg]

I need to do a live webcast. I guess I can use Yahoo! video, but I wan wondering if anyone had another idea?

I'd prefer free streaming video options.

Thanks

[Zero Tolerance]

I guess the big thing to first ask is "How many clients will be connected to your stream at the same time?"

The answer of that question will determine wether or not you can do this from a broadband connection or if you are gonna need more BW for the connections being made.

[Greg]

I decided to not do it. I have made too big a deal about it and will have to babysit too much computer stuff. I'm going to party.

Thanks for looking though.

[Zero Tolerance]

Ok....no problem.

But I came back to say that if you wanted to setup an Icecast or Shoutcast server and use P2P you could do it probably to an unlimited amount of connections.

[Greg]

I have no idea how many would want to use it, but it's fair to say a minimum of 25 per hour may view it and we were gonna be broadcasting up to 5 or 6 hours.

[Zero Tolerance]

Well the thing would be how many at the same time. Unless you are running some type of peer to peer stream broadcast you will have to take your available bandwidth and divide it by the samplerate you are streaming at to see how many connections you can have with zero lag.

I run my live radio station streams at 64kbps. So my dj is encoding his stream at that rate. I have a 2Mbps up/down pipe so I can easily handle 30 concurrent listeners on my stream without any of them buffering or lagging out. I could decrease the samplerate and increase the listener base...but at the expense of quality. Video would be the same. This is why P2P is so much more advantageous, simply because you can pretty much have unlimited concurrent connections since all of the connects arent being recieved from your stream server. However the downfall of P2P is all people would have to be part of the P2P network and most likely have to install some type of application in order to participate. This would make embedding the video into a webpage alot harder.

I know you said you canned the idea...just wanted to elaborate a bit just in case anyone else stumbles upon this thread.