Building a Streaming Server

[BradShoemaker]

Has anyone thought about taking this to the next level, ditching the UStream or Livestream, etc and creating their own streaming server?

[LucaB]

Has anyone thought about taking this to the next level, ditching the UStream or Livestream, etc and creating their own streaming server?

I would assume that would be costly if you have a popular show with say more than 500 people viewing at once. What would the upside be?

[BradShoemaker]

Upside would be I could optimize it for my use. It is also costly to have the pro version of Ustream take care of it. I am currently downloading each show (since Ustream now has limits) and will be placing them on my Amazon S3 account for distribution.

[sunkast]

As far as I can tell there's really no way around the cost of taking it to the next level. What you would want to do is get a dedicated server and run Wowza Media Server or Adobe Flash Media Server on it. You can also run multiple servers, relay feeds to multiple services including Ustream, Stickam, and Justin TV without losing your audience you've built up on the services. But again, that's adding to the cost because you need to license multiple copies of the streaming software.

[erictimmer]

Todd Cochrane over at Geek News Central has been experimenting with Amazons web streaming service. He has a pretty large audience and the bill doesn't seem to be too big. Best part about it is zero ads, and of course it's backed by Amazons world class cloud. Another benefit is that you know exactly how much bandwidth you are consuming and direct access to stats.

This is something you might want to consider if you don't want to run your own servers, which has another bunch of problems that haven't been discussed yet....maintaining the server's security, etc. As a content creator the more time you have to spend on running the backend the less time you have for your show. It's a difficult balance for IB's.