Hello folks!

I am planning on building a site which streams video to clients. Imagine a simple HTML page with a flash video embedded on it. So far so good, appears to be just some flash movie embedded in a plain html page.

Now, let's assume the video I'd like to stream has a length of 10 minutes.

The video should be played no watter if anyone is connected or not. The stream should shared by everyone.

This means that if user1 joins right off the start he'll watch the video from 0:00 to 10:00. A user that joins 5 minutes after the video was streamed he'll only catch the last five minutes.

Somehow the server should trigger the streaming process and when a user joins he/she'll have missed the parts of the video already streamed.

It should be like a cinema. The video starts at 9:00 GMT. If you're late, you'll have missed the beginning.




Now my question is: How would I do this? I've never worked with a multi-tier-streaming(like Youtube). How can clients (which are in no way related) share the same stream?


The technologies of choice were PHP, *SQL, and flash/html5.


I'm open to any suggestions or questions.


Thanks,

Laurent