TABLE OF CONTENTS Now you're ready to take on the distribution of your newly encoded material over the Internet. Up to now, you've focused primarily on the client side of the equation, such as choosing the right codecs that will best reach your audience. In this chapter and the next, you'll learn about the server side. This chapter discusses:
Whether or not you need to own/operate a streaming server
How to get ready to serve your streams
In some ways, serving streaming media is the biggest challenge facing a streaming producer. You will have to work closely with the people who manage your organization's network resources, and they may have little or no experience with streaming media. Streaming media is a demanding technology, especially on bandwidth, which is the amount of data that can be transmitted over a network per second. Network and system administrators in organizations large and small have to balance all the demands made on a network, and streaming can throw their systems out of kilter. Hopefully, you've explained your plans to your IT department, so they can prepare for the day when you deliver your content. It's important to have them on your side throughout the process.
On the other hand, you may decide that your network can't handle streaming. Maybe the network expertise you need isn't available in-house. Perhaps you don't have enough bandwidth for the traffic you expect. You have another option: outsourcing.
| Alert | The upfront discussion of outsourcing... |
