By Daniel D Dwase

In an age of rich media and social networking, some degree of streaming is inevitable in order to get the most out of the Internet.

Whether it's online video, instructional material or simply advertising, rich media is here to stay and by harnessing the power of a streaming media server, your business can ensure that everything happens smoothly without affecting existing server infrastructure and giving your users that little bit extra, so they can get the experience they expect when browsing your website.

However it's only recently that it became possible to stream to the masses. This is because streaming media is actually quite an intensive process.

After all, it involves the storing, encoding and delivery of large amounts of data on demand and in real-time to multiple concurrent users.

As a result, often the most expensive aspect of streaming is not the dedicated streaming server itself, but the bandwidth costs.

Bandwidth, Server Hardware and Software

Traditionally in the web hosting industry, bandwidth has always been something that a website simply needed to function.

High quality was great, but not always essential. When it comes to streaming, the importance of ensuring that your company's dedicated streaming server has good routing is essential.

You may pay more to be housed in a high quality data center, but it's an essential cost required in maintaining effective service for your customers.

Server hardware is an important aspect for any dedicated server purchase, and in this case the importance of storage, processor and connectivity cannot be understated.

When it comes to software choices, it's important to take a look at streaming solutions not based on their cost of ownership, but based on the fact that some proprietary technologies can deliver streaming that is both higher quality and also more efficient than many open source solutions.

Choosing a dedicated streaming server is more than simply hardware, bandwidth and software. It's an important combination of the three and as a result it's important to make sure that budget and estimates are sufficient to cover all three areas.

If one area is lacking, it will undoubtedly lead to problems in all three with the end result being more expense.

Hardware choice is an important issue, as the primary limitation on concurrent stream viewers is not just a bandwidth limitation, there are actually numerous bottlenecks to consider, so as a general guideline CPU, Memory and also Disk Throughput are vitally important as they are often initially overlooked, and these issues don't become apparent until a streaming server is overloaded.

As a result, choosing a well specified dedicated streaming server is essential. To help in the process, it's generally advised to make a generous estimate about the number of simultaneous viewers so that realistic hardware requirements can be gauged.

In today's world of cloud computing, this is an exciting new prospect for dedicated streaming, as it gives you almost limitless power and processing ability to handle streams.

This is also an infinitely scalable solution, and while it's something that's more expensive than a single dedicated server, it also has the power to be infinitely more powerful and scalable.

Hardware and bandwidth of course are not the only financial considerations you need to make however as there is more involved than simply renting a box with good bandwidth.

Establishing and Calculating Streaming Requirements

Indeed, when establishing a budget to help choose a dedicated server, you need to consider what the individual streaming requirements are. This is because different applications have extremely different requirements.

Establishing streaming requirements is a case of looking at the media and identifying the delivery requirements.

From here it's possible to calculate bandwidth requirements, storage requirements and even the processing power required, and it's a necessary step in reducing costs and ensuring that a streaming server isn't either under-powered, or simply too powerful and thus too expensive.

Calculating streaming requirements may initially seem impossible, but it's actually quite a straightforward and essential process, as without it it's hard for you to know what the bandwidth or storage requirements will be for your media and most importantly, what sort of bandwidth requirements you will need.

Take a look at the example below:

128kb/s x 10 = 1280 kb/s or 1.6 Mb/s

Essentially, the formula for calculating bandwidth is bit rate x users = bandwidth required (bits) or bandwidth required (bits)/8(bytes)

Today, popular bitrates for streaming start at roughly 128kb/s for audio, and a typical video bit rate is around 300kb/s which excludes audio.

As you can see, the bandwidth requirements for a dedicated streaming server can be high, so it's important to ensure that bitrates have been minimized and efficient methods to deliver data are being used.

If your requirement for streaming is to a private network, a popular solution for your business is the use of multicast streaming technology.

Typically, there are two types of streaming, multicast, and unicast. Multicast takes advantage of TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) by streaming to the broadcast address on the network, instead of streaming to every individual client.

As a result, bandwidth costs can be exponentially reduced, because multicast streaming sends the stream only once, it's subsequently picked up by clients who have been listening in on the multicast IP address.

Finally, there is the choice of software streaming package to consider. Today, this is a mix between budget, streaming requirements and also hardware availability. Luckily, there are a number of open source solutions available, and perhaps one of the best is the offering from Apple which is called Darwin.

This has widely gained recognition as a highly powerful streaming platform which can support thousands of concurrent users, and the software runs on most operating systems.

Do You Need a Streaming Dedicated Server?

Lastly there is one more question you need to ask yourself before you purchase a dedicated streaming server, and that's 'Do I really need a dedicated Streaming server?'.

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol ) is a reliable protocol and it can be used to transfer files seamlessly. If all you need is to transfer a video or audio file to your users, then perhaps the most efficient and economical way is simple, HTTP transfers.

A Great Choice for Your Business

A dedicated streaming server however is a great choice if your business needs a dedicated resource that can stream media to your users.

The benefits are that it protects the rest of your company's infrastructure and at the same time, it gives flexibility and the ability to deliver more than just traditional text and images.

With the introduction of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 rapidly approaching, streaming media is becoming the norm for online media and in the future, streaming will become even more of a mainstream activity than it is today.

With petabytes of media out there, people are starting to realize that streaming really is the way forward.

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