Streaming Live Audio

[ganons]

Hi

Is it possible to setup a live audio stream which can only be heard via registration or invites maybe? And for that stream to be on e.g. my website and not by going to another website that is maybe providing the service?

Free or cheap

Thanks

 

[FAST6191]

First- there is always the problem of rebroadcast and for audio it is near trivial. I would usually say deal with it and it actually makes life easier as you do not have to worry about securing the stream and can instead use a standard web servers to do whatever you need (I would probably use either a forum or http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts and an email option like http://www.phplist.com/ but nothing stopping you from going manual with .htgroup and whatever you want for invites).

Second- I would consider some method of having an upload to somewhere and your users connect to that. Normally I would not mention it but as you want to do it yourself I do, this as you really do not want to be streaming multiple audio connections out of a UK upload. Depending upon the nature of your website/your hosting this could get tricky- basic free hosts and most cheaper hosting have limits on what you can do to a system and trying to install custom audio encoding (even whatever CGI is limited to) gets to be halfway fun but looking around http://www.vinz486.com/portal/index.php?ind=pico looks like it might work.

Personally I would have said screw it and just use one of the services that people use to stream videos of various forums or host a VOIP call of some form but you know what you are after, I will note the "prestige" of doing it all in domain seems somewhat diminished in recent years though.