At least in the Starcraft II scene, Azubu seems to be the new player on the block. They must have some connections or be making some sweet deals, because in a relatively short time they've got several well known streamers using them.
On a back of the napkin calculation, how much outgoing throughput would one need to be able to stream to ten clients directly on say 720p (~30 frames per second)?
I was wondering if it would be possible to create a set up where people can stream from home without any third party in between. Is that even possible for larger audiences?
Slightly off topic but If I remember right, about a question of viability someone at Justin.tv (I guess now twitch) said (this is about four years ago) that playing like a thirty second ad clip can more than cover their operational cost of streaming for an hour. I guess what I wanted to hear from that was that streaming is cheap. Scale probably matters a lot though.
You'd want to do something like HLS which can use standard HTTP but not directly to someone's home. You'd need some sort of CDN or cloud intermediary to handle the load.
Or some sort of peer-to-peer Popcorn time style (Bittorrent Live?[1]) that can distribute the load across all viewers.
Hmm... "Twitch-Time" may be an interesting way to resurrect that service.
This is the kind of thing that MBONE (Multicast Backbone) [1] was created to handle. Unfortunately, due to security concerns over multicast IP and no dedicated support for multiple parties, it died shortly after being birthed.
My thought was to piggyback off of web rtc and other free software projects already available just to learn more about it. I'll be pretty happy to just get it working so two clients can watch a stream. I was already looking to learn something this summer so this should be a nice place to start. Thanks!
At this point it's probably a better move to build and then sell/license a streaming service directly to the game publishers. If they provide a streaming system, they can control the copyright directly.
