web cast from own website

[bluedolphin]

Is it possible to broadcast from your own website if you have a web cam or is it really difficult ...beyond the home user..am interested in teaching in real time over the web .....dont want to use some of the commercial sites too much porn on them.

[j2buttonsw]

I've been thinking about this and I think your biggest problem will be your IP address. If you bought (or hired long term) an IP address from your ISP the internet world could resolve it to www.bluedolphinonlinetutorials.com (or whatever name you wish to operate under) and you could do what you want: host your own website/do web broadcasts etc etc. If you have a dial-up internet connection or are even on broadband, your IP address will not be constant so you could never resolve your www.bluedolphin... to a persistant IP address. If you do it through a commercial site, they will have a static IP address to which you could be resolved to. There again, I could be totally wrong and have wasted all that thought.

[lisaj]

You can, and frequently do, get static IPs for broadband connections. For instance, I have one. Your problem with broadcasting however has nothing to do with this, but with traffic rates. If you have a 128Kbps video stream, you need this for each listener. Get 8 people watching your stream and suddenly you need a 1Mbps line. Not only is this not cheap, but to get a broadcast that doesn't constantly break up, you need a constant bandwidth, rather than the peaks and troughs of broadband, and this costs even more. Your best bet with this is to relay a single single from your webcam through a server with LOADS of bandwidth, co-located in a hosting facility. This is all possible, and can be achieved cost-effectively, but it needs MUCH more discussion that can be achieved here: email me at [email protected]