Hands-On Guide to Webcasting

CHAPTER 11

Webcast Distribution

Now that you’ve invested the time and money to produce and encode a high-quality webcast, it’s time to distribute it to the masses. This is where the Internet becomes a new mass medium, one without boundaries or licensing restrictions.

Thankfully, there is an existing web server infrastructure on the Internet, and streaming servers are not that different from web servers. There are a few ways in which they differ, and ways in which server hardware can be optimized for streaming, but basically the concept is the same: streaming servers respond to client requests for files. That’s why it’s important to leverage the experience of your network administrators—they understand how to build solid serving architectures. ...