Video Streaming and Hosting Solution

[bobhvid]

We want to be able to record things from our phone and have it stream to a video server that makes this live stream available to other users via a webpage of some sort to hold the video. I have tried ustream to start, but this seems to save the video/broadcast on their server after you are done with the live broadcast. We want it to be saved at our location. Is there an option such as this for ustream? There is no tech support for this product, so I can't find out whether we can do that or not

If not, can anybody tell me how we can get a phone of ours to stream video into our own server and have it play on a webpage live? I've heard of Flash Media Server. Is that usually the way it's done? We would rather stay third party rather than have own own server if we could have enough control of where things get stored or saved, but if we need to set up our own streaming video service to get this, then any help to point me in the right direction would be appreciated. Thanks.

[TreeTops]

A lot of sites use jwplayer to display videos. Have you looked into that software solution?

[bobhvid]

Hi Treetops, thanks for the response. No I haven't looked into jwplayer. It sounds like that is the player, but what about hosting of live streaming and saving the recordings?

[TreeTops]

Guess I really don't understand what you want to do. If you want to stream stuff to a website then use a IP camera. (In my area, my ISP would complain if I did that.) If you want to broadcast from your phone, I don't know how to do that and the quality would be piss poor anyway. Just look at the phone stuff CNN broadcasts when they have a breaking news item. Those phone videos just stink. And they are usually in portrait mode so they have to block the sides with some graphic to fill out the screen. I know you wouldn't do that but use a real video camera if you want people to enjoy your videos.

[bobhvid]

Hi treetops. We don't care very much about high quality, and we need to stream from a phone because we are making a product that will stream video back to a server for others to view real time while someone drives and walks around. I can't get into more specifics, but we are taking advantage of some native capabilities of a phone rather than making things from scratch, so with it's portability, video and messaging capabilities, using the phone is a good choice for us and quality isn't a big issue.

[TreeTops]

I did a Google "how to stream from a phone" and got several hits for software that does it. Some software only works on certain phones. Have a look.

[bobhvid]

Thank you much. Did you mean to leave a link to what you found?

[TreeTops]

I didn't include a link because there were several solutions/software.

[bobhvid]

Hi TreeTops. Yes, there are software solutions for streaming from a phone, and ustream is one, but they all seem to store the saved recordings on their service since it's their service/server that's make the broadcast happen. So we might have to get our own Flash Media server and make our own phone app, because it looks like there are no third party apps that will allow us the privacy we want. I was trying to see if anybody else ran into something like this and what solution they used.

I followed up on jwplayer and I had a rep call me but he couldn't answer my questions right off and was supposed to get back to me but hasn't in a few days.

[TreeTops]

Did you look into the IP camera idea?

[bobhvid]

We need other capabilities like gps location, ability to make wireless connections to servers, photos, maximum mobility with minimum size, ability to install custom apps....All which the phone already gives us and an ip camera probably would not

[TreeTops]

Me-thinks you want too much.