I am planning to use FCS for a Flash 'broadcast' application because it has the
ability to tunnel through corpoarate firewalls and proxy servers. The ability
for corporate users to connect is key. However, I will only be broadcasting
text. Is FCS overkill? Are there other third-party alternatives? (I can
install applications on my server.)

FlashCom is a great product, but for what you want to do it is probably
overkill. Take a look at the Darwin Streaming Server (the open source
version of the QuickTime Streaming Server; actually identical to QTSS, but
without support other than from the Darwin community). You can run this on a
variety of platforms, and it's free:

<http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/streaming/>

The current version of QTSS/DSS is 5.0.1 -- for a thorough overview of what
it can do, download the QTSS admin PDF at:

<http://images.apple.com/server/pdfs/QT_Streaming_Server.pdf>

Note that this PDF only refers to the OSX version of the product running on
an OSX server, but the functions are the same on other platforms running
DSS.

Also, you can produce your text broadcast in Flash if you want to, so long
as you save it as Flash 5 (that's the version of Flash that the current
version of QuickTime supports). So you get all the benefits of developing
your content in Flash and streaming it free in QuickTime:

<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/QuickTime/QT6WhatsNew/Chap1/chapte
r_1_section_17.html>

On 2004/12/13 02:20 PM, in article cpl4k1$aie$1@forums.macromedia.com,
[quoted text, click to view]