Monday, June 11, 2007

Broadwave streaming server

I had a need to set up a streaming server for spoken content and since I'd previously done lots of work with RealMedia I checked that out first (if it's OK for the Beeb...!). I'd set up the streaming servers for the first couple of years of Big Brother (when the G2 version was considered clever) - but now it's all Helix servers and the the old NT4 version wouldn't play nicely on the box I was trying it on and the prices have gone UP! 400 streams costs you around $22k in licensing. I only need a few dozen streams and so I looked at Broadwave - this is largely agnostic, negatiating with the browser what codec to serve up. It works very well and starts with Windows Media 9 and tries WM7 and then streamed MP3. There can't be many client machines that can't handle one of those!
The only caveat on the free version is 50-streams and a little logo on playback - that's just fine and doing the business where I needed it.


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