Streaming video hosting requires a player at the audience end.

Microsoft's Windows Media Player or Real System's G2 Player are the ideal solutions for viewing hosted streaming media on your intranet or internet site.

If your audience is primarily Mac-based you can also use Quicktime for your streaming video hosting.

Your video can be encoded into any or all of these formats, depending on the needs of your target audience.

Their relative merits are discussed below.

Windows Media Player
Most users will have Windows Media Player already installed with their Windows operating system.

It's free and it's good. It comes video ready, so just click on a video link, sit back, and watch.

If a user with an early version of Media Player tries to play a streaming video, then Media Player may need to download a small file called a codec first. This is quite safe to do, and usually only takes a few seconds, before the video will play. Once it is downloaded, streaming video hosting via Media Player is quick and easy.

IT departments can also update Media Player throughout an organisation from a remote admin terminal, so if you require a company-wide Media Player upgrade to the latest Media Player 8, then this is a relatively simple procedure, free of multi-licence costs.

Real Player
Real Player is the longest established video player. A free version can be downloaded from here

Real also have a G2 Plus version which promises better picture quality.

Real Player has better sound reproduction qualities than Media Player, so if you want to stream a music video, or where high audio quality is crucial, then this will probably be your best choice.

Hosting
All videos are hosted and streamed from a fast video-optimised server.

Regular corporate servers cannot do this without an expensive and seriously time-consuming upgrade.

If your organisation needs to stream video hosting and wants to minimise its bandwidth usage, then use restreaming. This means that video is streamed in via a single external connection to your main server.

Subsequently it is distributed internally (restreamed) from your server.

This will reduce the number of feeds and external connections when streaming video, therefore reducing bandwidth usage.

Restreaming can be easily set up without capital cost for those with Win NT or Win 2000 servers, as these are already video-ready, and contain the necessary software to do this.

Streaming video hosting will give you all these benefits and great performance for your viewers.

Take a look at the costs

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