Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Programming Discussion : Streaming Adult Content. Worth doing it yourself?

[chullfc]

I have a client that produces adult movies. They own the rights and sell the DVDs online. They now want to go into streaming. They currently use another company that provides this service but the company takes a nice cut from the revenue. I was wondering if anyone has any experience doing this themselves and might want to shed some light on the process. Is it worth taking on?

[Burhan]

The initial costs can be very high for streaming -- as you have to pay for large buckets of bandwidth and the hardware to support streaming.

There are companies that provide this hardware and bandwidth setup at subscription rates (some charge you the amount of bandwidth you use, what kind of streaming you do, etc).

I have done some on-demand streaming before -- it was over a closed network. Initially the setup is a bit of a hassle. Depending on what format you decide to stream, you must convert all your raw files into that format. This can be a lengthy process if you have a lot of playtime to serve. This also requires a very strong system beacause encoding is 99% processor intensive -- and requires a lot of memory.

However this is no where near as complicated as live streaming.

The most cost effective way for you would be to rent the bandwidth and hardware -- do the encoding offline (decide first what format you will choose) and then just write an interface to the streaming servers. Don't rent this hardware from vanilla hosting companies. There are specialized companies that provide streaming solutions.

[remmey]

Thanks for the quick response. I am pretty fortunate that the content is already converted so that is not a problem. What I am unsure of is, how can i allow viewers to purchase 'minutes' and then keep track of how many minutes a view has used up? Also does anyone know any payment gateways that allow adult content? I'm having a very hard time finding one. Companies I've contacted already:

-Authorize.net (doesn't allow adult content)
-LoudCommerce (doesn't allow adult content)
-Linkpoint (they seem to not work directly with customers but through resellers)

[emevas1977]

not sure how to do it off hand, but there is way do time control with quicktime. We did something awhile back,but it was used for 508 compliance, but I am sure you can do the same thing using quicktime and xml.