We are looking to stream hockey games next season via windows media. We need to support for 76 games at about 4 hours each. The games would be live. And an undetermined as of yet listener base. we would broadcast at or below 28 kbps. Any ideas???

http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/streaming/ for linux

Originally posted by triadwebhost
We are looking to stream hockey games next season via windows media. We need to support for 76 games at about 4 hours each. The games would be live. And an undetermined as of yet listener base. we would broadcast at or below 28 kbps. Any ideas???

I'd say get out your wallet :)

streamguys.com, mediacast1.com or alinq.com

Streamguys are on the same network as us, they're excellent. A bit slow at responding to emails tho :\

setup your own Windows asf streaming media. Make sure you are on good network (fast and low-latency) - latency is the killer for real-time streaming!

we know its gonna be costly but we wanna get the stuff in place and arrange corporate sponsorship. Any other ideas on a host or network that can support live windows media streaming???

Originally posted by triadwebhost
we know its gonna be costly but we wanna get the stuff in place and arrange corporate sponsorship. Any other ideas on a host or network that can support live windows media streaming???

<edit> removed what may be seen as advertising, wasn't this in the requests forum? or did i just assume that, ack :ack:</edit>


Sorry there :)

I would second Windows Media Service. We run a couple of stream farms and stream servers and it works flawlessly. WMS is included free with W2K Server.

bah windows.

Actually WMS is one of the better streaming platforms available.

Yes, I fully agree with RackMy.com nothing comes close to windows streaming. Check out pricing for Real Networks and you will see what I mean.

What about icecast streaming?

Icecast is audio and not video,eh?

For Live Video feeds I would recommend Real Server or Windows. The problem with either is to do live broadcoasting you have to get a pretty good encoder and also have a way to get the signal from your hockey game to your servers at the data center.

You might want to check out streamingmedia.com and join some of their lists to get some help from there.

Live broadcasting is a serious project that requires serious $$$ to do it right.

Hi,

You need a machine with windows NT or 2000 with Window Media Services, with at least a DSL connection and a video capture card, with this machine you will be encoding the live video and sending it to a server located at a good response network...

This server must have Windows Media Services also and it will be the distributing server... For a Live show, you can use Multicast instead of Unicast, and this will be much cheaper for you as you will consume a lot less bandwith... your server will only consume the bandwith of one stream in and one stream out (multicasted to all the users connected).

If you do it with Unicast, you will be consuming bandwith for one stream in, and one stream out for each user connected...

Also, if you have a DSL or Cable connection with public IPs, you can deliver from the machine encoding without the server, of course, with this kind of connection it must be a Multicast. If the DSL or cable is good and reliable, users will not notice the difference... just make a test and put some show online, place the link here and we will connect to it and tell you about the quality...

What hockey games would you be broadcasting, just curious. Streaming sports media seems to have died off so fast that most people never knew it existed. Be prepared to dole out quite alot of money to host this, the bandwidth and server strain is unimaginable.

I don't think Windows Media Service will cut it for live encoding a hockey game. You are going to need a higher end solution for this fast of action and probably a bit more bandwidth than a DSL feed.

I would check out Cleaner. It is on the low-end of the better encoders.

Also, you will not be able to multicast because your network and every end users network including their isps have to support this stream.

I don't think Windows Media Service will cut it for live encoding a hockey game. Actually it does a really nice job. If you can dedicate the machine as a "encoder" only and if it has any kind of horsepower, you should have no problems.