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Low Cost Webcast Optimizations?
ChunKing asks: "I work for a small community broadcasting organization, and we operate a limited streaming media facility for a number of not-for-profit webcasters. It has always been an issue to optimize our streaming media infrastructure to most benefit our users. We operate a small cluster of servers from a data center with good connectivity and a highly-rated ISP, who will occasionally allow us to burst to unlimited bandwidth. For big webcasts, we will load balance the stream over a number of servers using round robin DNS. However, we still get problems with stream buffering and network drop-outs, particularly with streaming video. We cannot afford a network of edge delivery servers like Akamai, so in what ways can we further optimize our streaming media capacity to better produce smooth webcasts?"
(This probably won't be helpful to your present problem, unless something along this line of thought already exists.)
I wonder how well a method such as bittorrent adapted to streaming data would do - i.e. decentralized streaming.
The first few viewers receive the stream directly from the source, while acting as mirrors for subsequent viewers. It would dramatically cut down on the server load & overhead for the broadcasters.
... at least for the most part. Encourage your viewers to download instead of stream, if at all possible.
Is it vitally important that they have to stream the data? You cannot just distribute downloads and Coral Cache em? Cut my bandwidth for files from 120GB/mo to ~15GB/mo
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Upload video to Google video or YouTube.
Use their bandwidth to stream your video.
Use their API to embed the video on your website.
You lose control over the distribution of the content, but you save a lot of money in the process. The other option is Bit torrent.
Also, have you looked into DigitalBicycle? They are working on a PeerCasting system for Using Bit Torrent, RSS, and web community software
For video? I'd recommend XviD, and not just because I use it almost exclusively, but it creates a compliant MPEG-4 video stream (compresses nicely), which will hopefully be streamable by any player that supports MPEG-4 video.
After all, even if they scale up with colocation and distributing their webcast to other servers, if they can handle [x] users but only get [x/2], with a burst of x+2 once every 6 months, it seems like they should focus more on what they can do to reasonably control dropouts among users who are already connected, vs the rare scaleup to accomodate a large number of users for a short period of time.
Of course, it might also prove out that by having more solid streams, they'll have more users, and will inherently get more users, which would lead to an escalation of costs. Might be screwed either way.
This problem has been solved already. It's called Ultravox. It's a protocol that is format-agnostic and is used to efficiently multicast a broadcast within the data center up to the point it leaves your network. America Online and Cisco designed and implemented the protocol both in software and in the firmware of specialized Cisco routers and it is used for AOL Radio and for Winamp radio It's very interesting. All your viewers need is Winamp to hear or view your program.
http://ultravox.aol.com/
Kriston
Most of the time, what you're describing isn't streaming, but downloading. Windows media and quicktime both "stream" downloaded content for the user.
Torrenting is the new downloading, if people want to get the latest and greatest on the net then they'll just have to learn how it works. I'm sure that it will just eventually be configured automatically as well though.
I think you should examine the situation a little more closely.
For instance, if you produce a video that uses a song from Britney Spears (not that anyone would ever do that, but play along), the licenses required to allow people to physically download copies of that song to their hard drives are different and usually vastly more expensive than releasing the video as a live stream or as part of an on-demand system. The primary question of this article was maintaining fiscal responsibility, not opening the door to a finanical raping by the RIAA/MPAA.
Torrents are also nowhere near easy enough to use for the everyday consumer. It's nice to think so because, after all, everyone on Slashdot is a computer genius, but when you're trying to reach the broadest market possible, things like torrents and other forms of P2P are not viable options. Internet streaming is still, and will continue to be for some time, the best option for delivering content media to consumers at home.
When ever you're in need of a streaming solution look and see what the Pr0n industry is up to. Awhile back Wired ran an article on an adult site who claim to offer P2P streaming Pr0n...great way to save on bandwidth if it works.