What's the best solution to create a 'streaming video website"?

Question

We are considering developing a streaming video website, like Youtube. What are the technologies available, and how to leverage them?

I know that clients like Adobe Flash Player, Silverlight etc can be used to play the streamed movie, but my concern is more or less regarding the server architecture, encoding etc. Please help.

Right now, we have .NET technology expertise, along with knowledge in C#. Thanks

Update:

I mentioned youtube just to get the idea of the technology, it is no way related to youtube in terms of business ideas. This is for a client, in education domain. Thanks

Answer 1

Just make your business guys buy one of the gazillion existing copycat Youtube sites.

(I know this will cost me rep, but I couldn't resist...)

Answer 2

You should at the minimum investigate co-location partners, like Akamai, to increase quality for clients around the world.

Answer 3

A similar architecture, but used to distribute mainly sound is the Conversations Network. They leverage Amazon S3 and EC2. The whole architecture is documented. Have a look at the interview of Doug Kaye. This project is also documented on Amazon's case studies. You dont have to use Amazon, but the concepts outlined in those articles can be reused in other projects.

Answer 4

Since you already have .NET technology expertise along with c# knowledge, I would look in the direction of silverlight

Answer 5

Amazon EC2 makes a great platform for video encoding. There are several commercial services (I like MediaPlug and Zencoder) and there are open source projects like Panda.

Answer 6

1. Are you planning on Streaming live or on-demand?
2. What is your timeframe for deployment?
3. Will your content need DRM?
4. Is your user base global or regional?
5. How many concurrent users do you need to support?
6. Are users in an enterprise or on the internet?
7. What is the breakdown of OS usage for your user base?
8. What is the breakdown of connection speeds for your user base?

The actual player (Silverlight, Windows Media Player, QuickTime, or Flash) that you use is only the "tip of the iceberg". That being said, take a look at the Adaptive Streaming technology being offered by Microsoft and Akamai at SmoothHD.com.

Michael

Answer 7

If you want to go the free but non-scalable way, go for ffmpeg-php to encode uploaded videos.

Answer 8

Have actually been looking into this aswell, and I agree with WindPower. With FFMPEG you encode the user uploaded video to the FLV format, and after that you can use your favourite FLV player (http://emehmedovic.com/xmca/toobplayer/ lovely!) for playback.

I have no idea what type of hosting you got now, or are checking into, but if It's shared hosting you might check up which ones that got FFMPEG availiable for their customers.

Answer 9

take a look at Red5 .. the Open Source Flash Server

(from the website) it does:

• Streaming Audio/Video (FLV and MP3)
• Recording Client Streams (FLV only)
• Shared Objects
• Live Stream Publishing
• Remoting (AMF)

Answer 10

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