Streaming Media Server and Hosting

My partner and I have a webcam site that basically runs the old-school method....Ev开发者_如何学Pythonery 0.5 seconds the javascript reloads the image in the browser from the webcam. However we are wanting to upgrade to a streaming media server to get higher quality video, and possibly audio. We aren't tied to any one specific file format or server type, as of right now we are leaning towards slicehost (as scalability is important), and installing darwin streaming server or wowza.

This is meant to be a live stream. Does anyone have any suggestions for hosts/server software?

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Wowza is great and they offer an Amazon EC2 setup with micro pricing to make it affordable.

You can always go with Flash Media Server, but that is expensive.

Red5 is free and open source.

UPDATE

Based on your comment, you can also use UStream. It is free and will hook into Flash Encoder, which is also free.

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Do you absolutely have to stand up your own streaming server? Services like LiveStream can do what you're talking about for much cheaper than setting up your own hardware.