Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Specialty Hosting and Markets : Live Video Stream hosting (multicast)

[evil_the_cat]

Hi All,

I've been told that multicasting is the most bandwidth efficient way of doing live video streaming. Is that something all web hosting providers are likely to support, or would I need a specialist host? Do you know how much it is likely to cost?

I've done a bit of googling, but none of the hosting companies seem to mention multicasting.

thanks in advance.

[hosteur]

Check this: http://www.softlayer.com/services_cdnlayer.html

[227b]

I don't think CDN can help in video streaming. Though I see at http://www.softlayer.com/services_cdnlayer.html that they support many media . confused

[cristibighea]

It does help with video streaming, and with ease actually, as you don't need to develop your own backend, and you can scale to thousands of mbps quickly. SL's CDN is the same as InterNAP's CDN, so if you have used it before it's pretty much the same thing, though SL lacks certain features that InterNAP may have available; still, you can't beat the low price for no commitment.

[AsmoB]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast has a pretty quick overview over what it is, and some diagrams explaining why its good.

Unfortunately, a lot of the eyeball networks do not support multicast, so if the consumers of your live video feeds can't use multicast, its not of much help to you.

I would think that it would really come in handy nowadays when the source and sinks of all of the traffic are on the same network, or a couple networks, but all of the networks involved would have to support it.

[Funkadelic]

You don't need Multicast to conduct video streaming. I doubt it will be of much benefit to you other then just finding a host that can help you setup your server to conduct the streaming itself.

[evil_the_cat]

Thanks for the responses. The main reason I was looking into this was because I was looking into whats needed to have an infomercial type internet tv channel that is always running in a loop. The viewers should be able to just go on to the site and view the stream.

The problem is if I have a 250kbps stream continuously over normal protocols (Unicast?) the cost will go up enormously by the time there enough users to make a decent return. With multicast the bandwidth requirements could have stayed low.

But if it can't be done, I guess my problem isn't technical but financial.

Cheers

[shuman202]

good topic

[VideoPR]

Buy a bunch of High Bandwidth DEDI's with 100MBps lines and then set up your own stuff. It'll be more cheaper and will work out for you in the long run.

Coz with CDN's like softlayer..u'll have to pay /GB of usage..and that will suck if you get tons of ppl everyday.

[funkywizard]

Yeah, it does sound like a financial rather than technical problem, but, you can always try to find cheaper bandwidth. I'm currently pushing video traffic at a total cost of about 1-2 cents / gigabyte. If that kind of cost is in your price range then your project could be feasible.

[VideoPR]

Originally Posted by funkywizard

Yeah, it does sound like a financial rather than technical problem, but, you can always try to find cheaper bandwidth. I'm currently pushing video traffic at a total cost of about 1-2 cents / gigabyte. If that kind of cost is in your price range then your project could be feasible.

Where are your servers located wizard? Damn...that's a very good price!!

Who offers bandwidth at 1-2cents/GB?? :|

[funkywizard]

I've got 44 servers at fdcservers.net. 19 of them are doing video streaming from their gigabit network, which is what I base my cost on. They don't charge per gb, but I figure thats about what I'm paying from looking at my usage graphs versus what I'm paying.

[VideoPR]

Ohh...is FDC's bandwidth that reliable? I wasn't sure of it, so I decided to go for either Alphared or elsewhere instead.

Also can you PM me the URL of your site?

Also what's the server config needed for Video streaming wiz?

[funkywizard]

I'm proxying youtube videos. So you can go to www.vtunnel.com, and fill in youtube.com in the url bar and click browse. Then click on one of the videos. Streaming rates during peak hours aren't as good as off peak but still certainly fast enough to stream the video without buffering, which is really what counts.

Alphared aka orangefiber, their network is good but the company is a bunch of douches I'd never do business with again. Serious pain in the ***. Plus its a lot more expensive than fdc so why bother. If i wanted something higher quality than FDC i'd probably use steadfast, I was happy with them when I tried them out but they're quite a bit more money.

If your business model is such that you can afford $10-15 / megabit instead of $2-5 / megabit, you can get a more solid streaming experience from another provider at those price points, but FDC is good enough for my needs and is much much cheaper.

As for config, I'm able to push up to 360 megabit from a core2duo with 2gb ram using nginx with about half the ram free and about 2/3 cpu usage. None of the traffic is hitting the disk, it's all proxied from youtube, so if you need to push that kind of traffic with local content, you'll probably need some fast hard disks and more ram to take advantage of file system caching.