[streaming] Enterprise Ready Streaming On-Demand Server

[vlan at byu.edu]

I posted the following question on the forums.  It was suggested that I
submit to the mailing list.

____________

I have been a big fan of VLC for years and have always recieved good advice
here. 

The company I work for is currently in the process of replacing our current
cable tv offering with an IP television offering. We are going to use third
party boxes to encode and stream the live feeds (to H.264 AVS I believe). 

In addition to this we want to add a Media on Demand system. I have been
looking at different ways to accomplish this and I keep coming back to VLC.
My immediate concern is scalability (we have close to 50,000 potential
users). 

I thought I would post some of the basic requirements here and get the
advice from the community. I'll start with what is expected from the end
user's perspective. 

The end user will preferably have a single location (menu) where he can view
both the available live TV feeds and the content on demand. This location
should be accesible from both a PC/Mac/Linux and a set top box (connected to
a television). In my opinion it might make sense to use a modified version
of VLC for this. The content list provided to the user should be customized
for that particular user (determined by some sort of authentication). The
available feeds might be packaged as RSS. Now it is apparant that some sort
of management system will need to be in place to sit between the streaming
server and the clients. This management system will conatain all the
eligibilty rules for each piece of media and will most likely present the
customized list of content to the end user's client. 

Now there has been much talk about need for DRM to make some of our content
providers happy. However when providing a "secure" stream, DRM seems
irrelevant (correct me if I am wrong). 

Now on the server side we need something robust enough to handle a large
ammount of simultaneous on demand streams. It is preferred that it has the
ability to scale out (load balance streams across multiple servers). I have
not found anything that can do this without a great deal of custom
development (VLC inlcuded). 

Well this is the extremely high level overview. I am interested to see ya'll
opionions as to where VLC might fit in as a solution. 

Thanks for your time.

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/streaming/attachments/20061004/81699d92/attachment.htm