Video streaming network design.

[nafuti]

Ok guys, how is everyone? In my wonder recently, i happened to drop onto a thought as to how one could deploy a video streaming/sharing network, what to consider and how to make it work for users across the globe.
Shoot!

[RedBullAddicted]

Not sure what exactly you want to hear. From a network perspective there are two ways to provide a video stream. One is unicast streaming and the other is multicast streaming.

• Unicast protocols send a separate copy of the media stream from the server to each recipient. Unicast is the norm for most Internet connections, but does not scale well when many users want to view the same television program concurrently.

• Multicast protocols were developed to reduce the server/network loads resulting from duplicate data streams that occur when many recipients receive unicast content streams independently. These protocols send a single stream from the source to a group of recipients. Depending on the network infrastructure and type, multicast transmission may or may not be feasible. One potential disadvantage of multicasting is the loss of video on demand functionality. Continuous streaming of radio or television material usually precludes the recipient's ability to control playback. However, this problem can be mitigated by elements such as caching servers, digital set-top boxes, and buffered media players.

Here is a nice little example about setting up multicast routing and such in a gns3 lab: http://vimeo.com/7271595

Guess that was not what you expected? lol
Cheers,
RBA

[kenjoe41]

Contrary to what you might think, we are actually going to use http instead of UDP. You can either use plain HTTP or Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH).In this way, different versions of the videos (bit rate) can be distributed as per bandwith.A manifest file is provided for these video versions for the client to pick on.

Assuming you don't have a huge load of lawyers, so not much hould lead to you. If registration and/or payment is to be done, then you won't trust any one with your money so a server for this will be managed by you.

I suggest pay for cloud space, this is where your videos will be initially uploaded, formatted into multiple versions of both audio and video at multiple bit rates, and finally uploaded to your different CDNs(third party).

To reduce the load on a single server and many other factors, i suggest you employ third party Content Distribution Network (CDN)/s like Limelight, akamai and Level-3. These server clustersif brought near tier-1 and/or Access ISP provide for high-speed streaming of videos.

 But you could save yourself the trouble and set up a P2P video on demand network like PPTV, PPs, et-la.