BS-Server Features

BS-Server is capable of streaming audio and images from a simple PC running Windows XP or Windows Vista to a potentially large audience, using a standard web server as a bandwidth amplifier.

All you need to start your own Internet broadcast is this program, and the ability to upload files to some web server with FTP.

No special software is required in the web server. A basic server with no CGI nor PHP will do. BS-Server uses FTP to send your broadcast to the web server. To receive it, listeners will connect to the web server with the BS-Tuner, which uses standard HTTP to fetch the streamed content. The maximum number of simultaneous listeners depends on the usable bandwidth of the web server. A 10 Mbps bandwidth would allow up to 250 listeners for a 32 Kbps stream.

BS-Server uses a small amount of disk space in the web server, which exact size depends on the broadcast bandwidth. A 32 Kbps broadcast requires 1.5 MB disks pace, while a 256 Kbps broadcast needs 4 MB. The required diskspace is fixed, it is independent of the broadcast duration. You can stream gigabytes of audio and images without using more than a few MB of the server disk space.

You can easily set up a pay-per-view broadcast by encrypting your data stream with a secret key. Send the key to listeners who subscribed to your broadcast with PayPal or any other online payment processing services. You can further control access to your broadcast by setting user-based passwords with your web server htaccess files.

To view/listen to your broadcast, your audience will use BS-Tuner, a light-weight player specially developed to receive the BS-Server data streams. BS-Tuner is freely redistributable, meaning that your audience can download and use it for free. To protect your copyright and prevent others from stealing your photos and music, BS-Tuner has no "Save" feature.