I work in the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Salford and
have been managing and developing streaming media for the past three years.
We stream content using Windows Media Services 9 internally and externally,
both "Video on Demand" and live broadcasts.

I have created a "Streaming Media Resource (SMR)", which has been developed
in Apache (port 81)/PHP and is delivered through Blackboard. We also have a
third party piece of software, which uses IIS on port 80. I have set up a
process, which is:

1) Fill in "online Streaming Media Booking Form" in the LTC website, or SMR.
2) When I receive the request I contact member of staff to organise time and
date for media (VHD, DVD etc) to be delivered to LTC office.
3) I encode/transcode media and upload to a holding area on streaming server.
4) I contact member of staff again to inform them that their request has
been completed and they need to login to the SMR to add each clip to the
streaming media catalogue in the SMR (get link to media file in catalogue).
5) If they need any help with this, I take them through the process of
adding clips to the catalogue.

The staff understand this process and are using it successfully. 

The university has a three year hardware replacement cycle and our streaming
server is five years old now and we cannot stream to NHS Trust due to their
firewall settings and lack of equipment generally. The firewall problem we
face could be fixed very quickly, if we did have the third party piece of
software as we could stream via port 80. These are the main two catalysts
for this work.

All this work is not registered as a "recognised University service". I have
a project to investigate the what would be required to upgrade streaming at
salford to a "registered service". My initial thoughts would be to create a
survey to ask what the staff requirements would be for this work, but other
people think that would take too much time and would want me to go down the
line of investigate the use of "turnkey" solutions.

I was wondering what other institutions were doing regarding streaming.

Do you have a bespoke solution that you have developed yourselves?
Do you use "turnkey/3rd party" solutions?
Do you use external companies to host your media?

Anything else you can tell me relating to this subject would be very much
appreciated.