Ammon...WC has two licence points essentially. http://www.telestream.net/wirecast/compare.htm The $500.00 has limits on the feature sets. Some of the things that you can do in the $500 version of VB you can't do in WC Studio and visa versa. VB has 4 price points. The feature sets available are limited by the level of licence you buy. Essentially it a similar approach. Where the difference is that VB also is offered as a named user licence or a concurrent model and wirecast is simply concurrent. I am not certain on the upper limit of shots in WC. I haven't seen them but the Studio version does not allow scoreboards, IP cameras, virtual sets etc that you can do in VB Pro.

WC then charges a yearly fee for "premium" support. VB doesn't.

When you say that you are using WC to encode you are really saying that you have stopped using FMLE. You are still using VB to output to WC.

The vMix model is similar to VB in that there are restrictions on the Inputs(modules) and resolution at the different price points. The product however is much cheaper at each price point than both VB and WC.