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We would like to set-up a live video-chat web site and are looking for basic recomendations for software and hardware set-up. Here are the particulars on the site:

  • Most streams will be broadcast live from a single person with a web cam, etc., and viewed by typically 1-10 people, although there could be up to 100+ viewers on the high side.

  • Audio and video do not have to be super-high quality, but do need to be "good enough". The main point is to convey the basic info in the video (and audio). If occasionally the frame-rate drops low and then goes back to normal fairly soon, we could live with that.

  • Budget is an issue, so we are in general looking for a lower cost solution that will give us most of what we need in temers of performance and quality.

  • We are looking at Peer1 for co-lo.

  • The rest of our web site will be .Net / Windows platform. We are open to looking at any platform for the best streaming solution, although our technical expertise is currently more on the Windows side.

Alchemical
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  • -1, because this question is too broad and doesn't have near enough information required for a decent answer. –  Dec 26 '11 at 10:42

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You are a .NET shop, which means microsoft server. Install Media Services on your server... and you have access to the MS streaming system. "free" of charge since - ages, but most people don't know about it. YOu will need a LOT of bandwidth, btw. - for 100 people, make sure you have enough reserves they do not fall behind etc.

Media Services also allows playback, so ;) you can also show the stuff later easily.

TomTom
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After much research I discovered that Flash Media Server appears to be the industry standard. Windows Media Server may work, however Silverlight would be needed which only has around 50% market penetration vs 99% for Flash.

Update: Wowza and Red5 are also good options. We are likely going with Wowza. Again, this appears to be the industry standard due to people already having Flash on their computers. There may be slightly higher quality solutions out there, but you have to then get many of your customers to download something...

Cristian Ciupitu
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Alchemical
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