In order to do live streaming, you need video/audio capturing and encoding equipment and on the site where the event is being recorded. Even if you use a co-located server to broadcast your streams, you will still need a pretty hefty pipe from your location to the co-location facility.

I hope this information helps you. However, I am not an expert in the area of content streaming.

Best regards,
Frank Rietta

streaming live broadcasts is a specialist arena that most hosts cannot cater for. Basically, at your location being broadcast from, you have a server with all the live encoding in place. This server would connect to a broadcast server (probably via ISDN as it is only one stream). The broadcast server would then stream that one stream out to the masses. Its the output from this that eats bandwidth.

Most hosts only offer a prerecorded stream. RealNetworks have a tutorial on how to be a broadcaster on their site.

Hi

Can anyone recommend a hosting company that can offer live streaming? I would like to stream live broadcasts.

Or, if someone could at least provide rough costs that would be great, I understand it could be high, since a lot of bandwidth could be involved (??)

How many broadcasts, like 24 hour sort of thing. You probably need to co-lo a server and pay for a pipeline instead of for GB of bandwidth.

I'm not the authority for such things, but I would guess a T1.

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Mike Astin
WebAuthorities
http://www.webauthorities.com
http://www.resellerinfo.com - A free reseller information site (coming soon!)

I am not an expert in this area. To get accurate answers from the experts who are around here though, you will need to give more info. Such as is this audio only or video broadcasting, how many hours (as asked above), how big is the anticipated audience? It would also probably help if you state what software you are planning to use.

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Chuck Fox
http://cfoxhost.com