How do you stream live videos from a website via a third party?

We are wanting to provide live streaming via our website which may run from multiple locations (different people will run streams into the website) and whilst it’s rare we would stream multiple streams at once, it’s still possible.

We have been looking into our options such as:

Streaming to YouTube via Google Hangouts
JW Player
Sprout Video
Hey Watch Encoding
Wowza

We also know about sites such as ustream and such but we’re not interested at people having to visit external URL’s to watch the feed, it has to be on our own website.

We are just getting confused by it all and if all these places do live streaming or are they only on-demand?

We just wanna live stream them and then afterwards provide them as on-demand as well, which we would be happy to just upload to youtube for the on-demand purpose.

Will we need anything special on our server or do these places provide it all?

Will the people that record the streams need anything special?

We also read about Apple’s HLS and that sounds great - does it sound like what we need?

Thanks a lot for any help and advice!

Some of those services do quite different things with regards to the different facets of video streaming. If you’re not familiar with the terminology and processes involved, you’re best bet would probably be to use a turnkey service provider such as influxis or uvault that have the experience and capabilities and will be able to advise you on the best way to proceed.

Ok, thanks for the tips. :slight_smile:

One thing to keep in mind – live is a very, very different technical beast from recorded video.

Youtube is probably the best bet for on demand, if for no other reason than that is where everyone goes to look for videos. For live delivery options really depend upon budget – you can go pretty effective and low-budget with the ustreams or livestreams of the world up to very high budget custom operations. Note that ustream at least provides an embedded option so that would probably get you past sending folks to another site without spending an arm and a leg.

Thanks for the advice. Do you know much about youtube’s offering with their “live events” option?

Not a whole lot – last time I looked it was invite only and they hadn’t given us an invite. Looks like it is more open now. From what I understand the infrastructure behind it is quite impressive.

Alright thanks! :slight_smile: