Streaming Video

I can't say I know of any sites doing live TV simulcasts, but then again, I've never gone looking.

The pro license has 3 profiles:

100 connections/unlimited bandwidth
1000 connections/40mbps bandwidth
2500 connections/25mbps

Bandwidth allotments are cumulative (not per user). Once you reach your bandwidth limit, new connection requests will be rejected, even if you haven't met your connection limit

You can choose whichever profile works best for you. If you have more than one license on a given server, the profile will apply to all the licenses (you can mix & match profiles).

In the case of your 300kbps video stream, it seems your best option is the 1000/40 profile. This will let you serve about 136 concurrent users on each license.

Flash media server does not do dynamic compression, so your bandwidth consumption per user will be based on the bitrate of the publishing stream. You can adjust that a bit on the client side by reducing the playback FPS, but it's not going to make enough difference to make FMS more cost effective than WMS or other streaming technologies.

Of course, there's the origin/edge license scheme for high volume deployments. I haven't worked with it myself, so I can't comment on how well it works. I understand the cost is somewhere in the area of $45k for 5000 users/unlimited bandwdith... but my info isn't from Adobe so don't take my word as fact on that one.

I don't see any reason why you couldn't do this. As long as you can feed the signal to a video capture device, you can stream it through FMS.

I suppose you could take a line from the TV station's boradcast feed, and pump it into a capture card on a PC. Then you just need to select the capture card as the camera device (in the Flashplayer settings) as your camera. Ofcourse, you'll need a capture card or device that has a driver Flashplayer sees as a camera.