I have had a request from a real estate company for 'streaming' videos of properties for sale.

File size approz 6-7MB. Each file would be a video of a particular property and prospective clients would be able to choose which one they would like to watch.

Would I need to use a 'real' streaming service or would a normal shared hosting package do?

I would not expect huge hits, ie more than one viewer at a time.

Any thoughts / comments are welcome.

cheers

The answer really depends on how you're doing the streaming. Most people use a dedicated streaming server, such as Adobe's (http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaserver/), Red5 (http://osflash.org/red5) or Wowza (http://www.wowzamedia.com/). Running any of these on a shared hosting server would probably be impossible, but for a low-traffic site I'm sure a VPS would work fine.

There are also some approaches that don't require a separate server - see for example
http://richbellamy.com/wiki/Flash_Streaming_to_FlowPlayer_using_only_PHP. This might work on a shared server, but you'd probably want to check with your hosting provider before setting this up.

You may also be able to do this with a shoutcast server with on demand content.

If you get a shared account with the right company on Demand is usually offered.

You can load the FLV files on any hosting account (nothing special, just lots of bandwidth), and use one of the many FLV players on your site (again, nothing special, just HTML code).

Yes. I agree with Amy Williams, it's not really a major job. Just buy a hosting package upload the videos, on your page just enter the html codes for the player and pretty much does it.

You can load the FLV files on any hosting account (nothing special, just lots of bandwidth), and use one of the many FLV players on your site (again, nothing special, just HTML code).

As Amy Williams has said, you can just upload the file onto any shared webhosting account then use a FLV player to show the content, if you have a hunt round there are some tutorials for flash so that you can make your own (this way it doesn't look like the million and one other sites showing videos and you can place their logo on the videos).

A shared web hosting environment will allow you to place the FLV files on your website in "progressive download" format. Very few (if any shared hosting providers) offer true "streaming" allowing you to jump and skip around in the video before it is fully finished loading. For short videos this will not be a problem, but if you are going to do something like 20 minute walkthroughs, you may want to look for a host with streaming capabilities.

Take a look at JW FLV Media Player. That will help with embedding your video onto your site.

Yes it is Very very easy to do and just about any hosting account will be able to do it.