Flash Video -- Who is using this in Adult?

[lisa]

Absolutely not! Your only limitation would be the size of your hard drive and having room for the file, if a download.

[Chilihost]

Lisa is correct, I don't know of any file size limitations either!

[Xstr8guy]

Absolutely not! Your only limitation would be the size of your hard drive and having room for the file, if a download.

Ah cool. It must have just been a limitation on the conversion program I was using... Wildform.

[ccjax]

From what I understand from our Flash guys if you aren't using Flash Media Server then you are doing a progressive download of the file, rather than a true stream.

If someone is savvy enough they could save the .flv file that you are serving to them. Adobe has already announced that they are coming out with an FLV player for FREE. This could now be a big drawback to those people that are not doing a true stream. Even Youtube does progressive download.

Yep, if you are doing progressive download, the end user can still keep the .flv and play it with virtually any Flash Player. True Flash streaming can protect that, and if you do some MD5 with the player itself, you should be able to limit the streaming link from being broadcast out beyond your subscriber.

A good option would be to offload delivery to a Content Delivery Network (CDN), so all storage, licensing costs and hardware would be included in the price - you would just need to encode in Flash and the CDN does the rest.
Streaming Flash can end up costing less than progressive download as well -depending on whether your customers watch the whole video or just part of it.
And a good CDN, will have transcoding services included...or something like Flip4Mac has a good transcoding engine.

(We actually use the same network that delivers Flash for YouTube and ABC Television - keeps our costs down)