Good evening,
I have been in this field for a long time, and I will answer the question without going into details.
So here it is:
To create a live webcam site, the challenge is the codec and the bandwidth. If you want to publish a stream simply and stay in the "free" realm, you can easily do it using a webcam that integrates a web server, launching a Java or Flash applet to stream the image. Sending audio is also possible. As long as you have only a few visitors, the quality will remain acceptable, and the audio can also come through. But the bandwidth of your ADSL or cable provider will be taxed, and even if they tell you that your connection is 100 Mbps, keep in mind that in practice, this is far from the case.
The good way to do it, for example for creating a paid site:
We use a relay server equipped with a Flash Media Server, Red5, or Wowza. We publish the stream from the webcam on the server (so we use our ADSL or Cable bandwidth only once). And the visitors then connect to the server that is connected to a high bandwidth to retrieve the video stream.
There you go, it's quite simple, but...
The quality of the bandwidth significantly affects the quality of the image and sound. And all the hosting providers that offer "unlimited" bandwidth will refuse to host you properly if you have a "streaming" oriented site, or else the prices will have to be adjusted. At OVH or FREE, for example, you will quickly receive a warning inviting you to get in touch to choose a more suitable plan. Well yes, you need to understand that a provider like OVH, which has a total of 160 Gbps of bandwidth (yes, but distributed across peerings and between different providers => they play with the routes depending on the prices the operators charge them, and this impacts connection speeds depending on the origin or destination, this is a perfectly normal practice for this range of providers, so I’m not casting blame), cannot guarantee 100 or 200 Mbps per client; just a reminder, OVH hosts about 12,000 servers, so do the math.
And a successful site that offers free chat, for example, can easily consume an average of 1 Gbps, with "spikes" that can reach several Gbps depending on the hour...
Well, now, roughly speaking, I’m giving you the price of a mid-range Tier1 provider for 100 Mbps, you should count between 450 and 500 EUR + installation fees and the subscription for a rack in an independent housing center, around 1000 EUR/month for a 42U rack
There you go, you have an idea of the budget, not counting the programmers who will need to set up your webcam application ;)
It has to be very profitable, you can't mess up, but there are few real cam sites on the market. 99% are affiliates of these.
