Festivals, concerts, parties and sports reports live via Leaseweb streaming hosting
zaplive.tv, a new multilingual internet platform for live broadcasting, has selected Dutch hosting provider Leaseweb because of the size of Leaseweb’s international hosting network. zaplive.tv went live in April 2008. Everyone can easily make his own programme or even his own web-tv via the portal, all for free.
Companies, institutions and private persons can stream concerts, parties, reports on hobbies or sport events, even press conferences, only using a webcam or camera and a computer with internet connection. zaplive.tv not only is live but also interactive. Users can communicate via live chat and rate single broadcasts as well as commenting on them.
International DJs, Hollywood Stars and basketball
As an internet start-up, zaplive.tv hopes to generate enough internet traffic to attract advertisers within a year. Our earning model depends on the internet traffic we generate, explains Christian Steiger, the Technical Director and Co-Founder of zaplive.tv. And it started off well. We had a lot of interest from viewers in the first weeks. One point surely was our programme including performances of top ten bands. We had the finals of German premier league basketball and real Hollywood stars on the red carpet. And one user was streaming live from one of the biggest electronic parties in Germany with DJ-Sets from some of the world’s best DJs.
Streaming hosting
The size of the hosting provider and the quality of its network are important success factors for zaplive. The network uptime is extremely important for live streaming, explains Christian Steiger. We have chosen Leaseweb because they are a very large hosting company having a lot of available bandwidth. At the moment, Leaseweb’s hosting capacity even exceeds 200 Gigabits per second. That’s a lot. Leaseweb enables us to grow fast because they always maintain adequate over-capacity also.
Hosting bandwidth
zaplive definitely needs bandwidth because streaming is extremely bandwidth-intensive. You consume a lot more hosting bandwidth with streaming than if you only offer video-on-demand, explains Steiger. And we use flash streaming, which means that we need even more hosting bandwidth on a relative scale. I expect that we will be consuming 2 Gigabits per second of bandwidth within a year, so we need significant hosting capacity from Leaseweb.
Hosting solution
Leaseweb offers zaplive.tv a Dell-based server infrastructure that is located at EvoSwitch, a CO2-neutral data centre based in the region of Amsterdam (www.evoswitch.com). The associated network infrastructure is fully Cisco based. Leaseweb engineers handle the implementation and management of the hosting solution. Because we are based in Germany, a very practical aspect is that we can put our trust in the knowledge of their engineers. They helped us set up our streaming service, says Steiger. ‘Fortunately, we do not have to travel to the Netherlands for the implementation and management.
Business hosting
In the future, zaplive expects to be able to deploy the portal’s streaming design broader for companies that want to broadcast live images on their own website. Naturally we first need to turn the existing portal to success, then we expect to be able to serve companies outside the portal as well, explains Steiger. Companies that want to use zaplive’s streaming hosting design for their business, but wish to give their Internet broadcasts their own look and feel.