Wowza and Haivision Streaming

Producing live audio broadcasts for 3000 to 5000 listeners can be a big challenge. Shoutcast or Nicecast were good for mp3 streams with about 900 listeners. Enter Amazon, Akamai and other CDNs and you have an infrastructure to reach a larger listener ship. My challenge was limited budget and a relatively diverse environment of encoders and listening devices. With no set standard to reach all. Enter Haivision and now Wowza. It used to be Amazon and Akamai cloud encoders were leaders. But the cost was too prohibited. Haivision and Wowza now use a common engine and its simple to setup and use. Produce just a single RTMP stream and their applications have user interfaces where you type in a few URLs and click start. Within 30 seconds you can hear the stream and see the crystal clear video. The biggest challenge is multibit rate needs, multiple protocols and last mile connectivity. It appears that Akamai has this handled with additional edge servers to help 3G/4G coverage. I'm sure Level3, MirrorImage and other CDNs are following suite. 2014 brings a renewed challenge. Delivering a single RTMP stream but output it through a single transcoder. And deliver it with multibit rate support. And venue coverage of WiFi and 3G/4G will also be enhanced, so I suspect to see a few thousand more listeners each day! What challenges has live streaming brought to you?