We currently have videos in .wmv format & we wish to update/upgrade the way we stream videos online. We are thinking of perhaps using silverlight or flash to play our .wmv videos as it is more widely accepted.

We have 3 types of users who access videos on our website which are visitor (not logged in), member (logged in), paid member. The way it basically works is data gets entered into the database with the servers IP of which the videos are on (we have multiple servers). It also adds information about which publishing point to use for the video stream. That is how we separate all the content for the 3 types of users. Different publishing points allow different videos to be shown, using a command prompt application the information is fetched from our main servers database. IPs are then added & removed from the publishing point on windows media service.

The problem with the above & what we wish to achieve is as follows:

1. Only works with windows operating system, we need to be able to have videos work on as many platforms as possible. At least Windows, Linux & Mac with multiple browser support.
2. The method of using IP to control who watches what does not work good for Dynamic IP addresses. Also doesnt work on satellite internet & mobile phones. So we need a better way to protect our videos from non authorized use that does not put a limit on who can actually access the videos.
3. We are currently using Windows servers but we can change & provide test servers for testing purposes. We also wish to keep the feature that allows users to seek through the video without waiting for the entire video to load.
4. We wish to just simply provide a link to the video instead of it playing in the browser, for mobile phones & other operating systems that could not use the video player. Our biggest concern with that is that we use .asx files that contain the actual link to the video & that may not be supported as much as .wmv extensions. A solution to perhaps get the .wmv url out of the asx file for such users would be of great help but isnt a must in this current project.
5. If your solution can allow for us to increase/decrease the quality of a video, change audio track, & add/remove subtitles tracks without use of flash please be sure to include that solution. Please be sure to separate the cost of this in your proposal if you are able to do this. (We currently have multiple video files to achieve this)

We are open to solutions that go outside of .wmv, but we would need an automated system that would convert our thousands of videos. That may be too much work for everyone & we are really looking for the most affordable option as we try to continue to grow. But if you have a cost effective way to do this please do present it to us.

We will definitely have much more projects in the future. So please keep in mind that we wish to build a good relationship with whoever will do this project for us.

Time of course is very important so we would want this to be done as quickly as possible so be sure to provide an estimate of how long it would take to complete this project.

Here is a url with our current video stream: http://www.animecrave.com/index.php?page=multimedia/anime_episodes/ai_yori_aoshi/episode_01_japanese_LQ

Tags: amp, servers, video, videos, Windows, wish, wmv