Hi Everyone,
I came across a great perfect example of a client with a tube site whom we were able to help deliver overall better quality and save them money at the same time. Perhaps something here can help you with your business. For all practical purposes, this same methodology could be used for flash trailers on your tours or those on free hosted galleries.
My recommendation for this particular client was to have them license Wowza Flash Media Server Pro. This is sold regularly on their site
http://www.wowzamedia.com for $995 per server. MojoHost has a licensing agreement for this software and offers it to clients for +$50/monthly. What can it do for your business? See below...
Example Client Chart (24 hour view)
The spot where the bandwidth drops immediately is where the Wowza server became active. For this client the addition of Wowza that we recommended comes at a cost of +$50/month and generates a savings of over 40% on his bandwidth usage. Further savings were generated at a later date by encouraging the client to turn off the "auto-play" on his flash videos. The same client chose to continue allowing people to embed his videos in their pages, disabling this would certainly decrease usage some.
Simply put, it can save you money immediately and also improve your surfers experience. There is no need to add additional servers, Wowza can be installed to run right on your web server. Rather than using a default configuration which would have surfers downloading the whole file Wowza allows the surfer to intelligently view the stream. They can jump around the video and are ultimately only downloading what they are viewing. Herein lies a tremendous savings! The fact is that surfers often watch the very start then jump to the middle and then end of movie clips. With Wowza, you're only paying for what they watch rather than a normal setup where they are having to download and buffer the whole file to jump around and watch different parts.
Additionally, Wowza offers some new security features which can be used to lock down your content further. So, if you don't want to let people embed your flash video in their pages there was not previously a simple and effective way to prevent that. This does!
Wowza can also be used as a platform for live streaming very successfully, saving tens of thousands over the options from Adobe.
Wowza can also stream the new high definition format H.264 and also some other formats of media:
SHOUTcast
Icecast
Apple QuickTime Broadcaster
Vara Software Wirecast
HaiVision
Orban
If you would like to discuss this further please feel free to call, e-mail or ICQ.
Thank you kindly,
Brad
Hosting education thread, smarter Flash video hosting
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