What's Step 1 In The Video Streaming World?

[gerekall]

Hello,

I'm a newbie to the video streaming world and I'm looking for honest advice. I have my own cloud server for my websites but I want to start hosting and streaming my videos from my server and not leave it in the hands of YouTube or anyone else where I don't have any control.

I know there's a few options to host and stream videos and one of them is waiting for the entire file to download before it plays. That just cant happen.

What are the pros using to stream their own videos on their servers? Any advice would be appreciated...

Gerek

[guns1inger]

What sort of videos ?
To what audience ?
How many simultaneous viewers/downloaders ?
Quality level - low res/med res/high res ? Bitrates ?
Do you have any transfer limits you have to work within ?
Do you own the copy right on the videos in question ?
Will anyone be able to submit footage, or will only you be loading it ?
Do you need to be able to automatically encode footage and present it as it is loaded ?

[TreeTops]

What is it with cloud servers all of a sudden? I did a google search on cloud servers and they sure aren't cheap. Hundreds of dollars a month with per hour charges. So if you stream vids using a cloud server it will cost a real bundle. Am I not understanding this cloud server hype? I sure can't see the benefit. Maybe for a business that wants to stream videos and they have a cash cow to support it, that may make sense.