Live streaming costs is one of the topics we are most often asked to explain, so here’s my stab at outlining the factors involved from a PlanetStream point of view. Obviously you’ve also got to provide cameras, other hardware and an internet connection.

Here goes:

The hardest thing to figure out is how many viewers you will get as that is the biggest influence on cost. The cost of the service is based on three things and I’ll explain those so you can give them some thought.

Image Quality
This is expressed in Kilobits per second (Kbps) and the more Kbps the higher the quality. Generally the lowest quality you would use for video is 300 Kbps which will look good in a smallish window but not so good on a full screen. The most common quality used is 800 Kbps which whilst not quite up to the standard of a DVD is really pretty good. Anything above that might not be appreciated by many viewers as their internet connection could become the limiting factor.

Viewing Time
The longer you broadcast, the more it costs, as you would expect.

Number of Viewing Minutes
This is the hard one to work out as it is often a mixture of guesswork and wishful thinking. You need to figure out not only how many people will watch the broadcast but also how much of it, on average, they will watch. There is a big difference between 100 viewers watching all of a 1 hour broadcast and 500 viewers watching 5 minutes of a 1 hour broadcast. Two things can help you with this.

Firstly we have a “Live Streaming Calculator” that allows you to play around with the above three numbers to see the effect of different scenarios. Secondly our streaming plans allow to quickly and easily upgrade from a small capacity plan to a larger one. This means you can start cautiously but react quickly to increase capacity if you need to. Take a look at packages for Internet TV and Radio to get an idea of the options. For one off events just use the costs generated by the calculator.

During the course of my working week, I read many articles relating to the world of streaming. I was talking on the phone to a client on Monday about internet radio, and decided to do a little research on facts, figures and trends – I thought I’d share some of them with you:

As general connectivity to the internet becomes faster and more established, and with the advent of wireless broadband and public access to wireless hotspots increases, the old issues that used to limit the use of internet are no longer relevant, resulting in more and more listeners tuning in – an estimated 43 million people in the United States are regular weekly listeners of internet radio, and that number is set to increase in the near future.

Internet radio has a broad appeal, from commercial stations to niche and special interests – just Google whatever pops into you head and its more than likely a specialist internet radio station is broadcasting it! There appears to also be a particular appeal to ex-pats and travellers who want to listen to their favourite stations from back home.

A great advantage to Internet radio is that it can be used for listening to local radio stations in areas with poor reception, such as office buildings – It can be played through a wide variety of standalone software programs or applications that open inside web browsers.

PlanetStream offer packages specifically designed to be used for internet radio stations. If you are looking to launch your own Internet Radio Station and want to know more, you can email helpdesk@planetstream.net, call me on 01527 571731, or write a comment to this post.

Decided it was time to top up my understanding of PlanetStream’s live streaming service and so spent some time with the fount of all such knowledge, PlanetStream’s very own Matt Pygram.

He started off by explaining how you can simply reduce the process to three elements:

1. A camera
2. A computer
3. An internet connection

The camera could be a handheld, or a broadcast quality device, or multiple devices all connected to a mixing desk. Whatever it is, that is the domain of the video producer. The camera will usually connect to the computer via a Firewire connection, which works a treat, or a video/audio composite connection (which works a treat too but requires a special decoder card in the computer), or a USB connection which is technically feasible but really inserts too much delay to make it usable.

Assuming the connection is by Firewire the computer requires Flash Media Live Encoder, which is a free download from Adobe. Just by ticking a box you can save a copy of the live transmission on the computer too. You can also use Windows Media Player but unless you have a strong reason it’s not advised as you can get delays and Flash is just better and easier to use. Also with Flash you can use the latest H.264 codec which gives exceptional quality, on both PC’s and Macs even at lower bandwidths.

The third element, the internet connection, is sometimes the limiting factor in the quality of the transmission. A decent hard-wired broadband connection should let you stream at 800 kbps (kilobits per second) which will give a very decent quality result. However don’t expect anything like that if the connection is sub-standard and a dongle may not work at all. So pay particular attention to this aspect.

The cost of live streaming is surprisingly low these days and is based on the quality of the stream in kbps, the length of the transmission in minutes and the number of viewers the stream is expected to attract. PlanetStream have a nifty bandwidth calculator that will give you a cost for a given event.

The service can be set up very quickly but it’s always advisable to set it up in advance as PlanetStream will set it up ready to test so you can iron out any issues your end before the broadcast.

• @NetSecrets are you there? did you get this? let me know tonyb #

RealMedia is the streaming format created by RealNetworks.

For more information call us on 01527 571731 or email info@planetstream.net

RealFlash is a Flash presentation synchronised with a RealAudio soundtrack.

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RealAudio is an audio streaming format created by RealNetworks.

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RAM is a metafile that points to RealMedia streams.

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RealVideo describes the file format from RealNetworks for audio/video.

For more information call us on 01527 571731 or email info@planetstream.net

QuickTime is the multimedia architecture used by software tool vendors and content creators to store, edit and play synchronised graphics, sound video and music.

For more information call us on 01527 571731 or email info@planetstream.net