What do you recommend for enabling streaming on a site?
 

I want to include streaming on a website, and perhaps do a webcam chat site as well further down the road. So for streaming, should I purchase the Wowza software or are there cheaper alternatives? Is there an industry standard for what's used for streaming?

I use Wowza which I was led to believe is industry standard.
It has been mentioned recently though that there are free / cheaper alternatives, but Wowza is not exactly a budget breaker so it does for me!

That's good to know. I found something called Red5 which seems to be cheaper, but I've also heard it's pretty hard to work with. Anyone have experience with Red5?

I'm not really familiar with Wowza, but from what I read it seems much more streamlined and focused on media and streaming purposes and it seems the addons take care of basic tasks someone might want to do.

Red5 is a general socket server and can serve many different functions depending on what you're doing. The fact that it's free is nice and open source, but that's not necessarily the greatest thing. I personally found the documentation to be pretty annoying and I'm not sure how maintained it is.

I liked the fact its based on java, but some people consider it a pain in the ass. If you want to add certain things on the server side it has to be written in Java. You also need to set up Tomcat and there are additional security concerns that go along with that.

I used it a long time ago for a couple of flash applications before streaming and video,etc was so prominent. The socket server from Macromedia (this was before Adobe took over) was so expensive so Red5 was a good free alternative, but depending on your purpose it may not be right for you.

It sounds like if all you want to do is stream content, I think Red5 might be more trouble than its worth in your case.

actually sorry tomcat is embedded

We use Wowza, but Adobe Media Server is good too.

Don't even think about Red5 unless you are a super genius.

You could also use lighttpd.