I'm a bit confused when term "Live Video" is used with these kinds of services. Just to make sure I understand, this isn't like Ustream.tv correct? What I mean is, viewers aren't watching the video as it is broadcasted. It looks like you use the API to configure the service to accept a live stream which is then encoded to individual resources which cannot be viewed until the stream is complete. Does that sound right?
Sorry if I'm off topic. I'm actually in the market for white-labeled service which will allow me to broadcast live video to a large audience in real-time and also 'record' that live stream as it happened to my blob storage. UStream so far is the only company I can find to offer anything similar to this.
Viewers are indeed watching the video as it is broadcasted. I think the thing that's throwing you off is that you can request a VoD asset be created upon completion, but the RTMP and HLS outputs are a live broadcast.
Don't apologize, I think this is perfectly on-topic. It actually sounds like the service would be a really great fit for what you're talking about, so feel free to reach out.
Yes, viewers are watching the video as it is broadcasted. Transcoding allows you to upstream it in one format, and the viewers to downstream it in a different format.
This dissociates you from the format expected by the end users. The upstream format can be bad in terms of bandwidth consumption but cheap in terms of hardware requirements. Users can then watch the downstream in a low-bandwidth format which requires heavy duty hardware and software to produce (provided by this service).
This is live streaming. A Brightcove engineer demoed it for me about a month ago from his laptop. After a few minutes of coding he was producing multiple Flash and HLS streams of his laptop's webcam. Very cool.
If I understand what you want, I believe you could also do it with Brightcove + Akamai HD CDN.
Sorry if I'm off topic. I'm actually in the market for white-labeled service which will allow me to broadcast live video to a large audience in real-time and also 'record' that live stream as it happened to my blob storage. UStream so far is the only company I can find to offer anything similar to this.