The Blackmagic cards are nice. We use the Intensity Pro and Decklinks here. However, they have issues in Wirecast & VidBlaster so anyone using those apps should probably avoid the Blackmagic stuff for now. (or avoid the apps… ). They work fine in FMLE, the only ‘gotcha’ to these cards is that your frame rate is bound to the proper framerate of the video signal.
I don’t really do any HD. Tho sometimes we have HD source, but we don’t stream in real HD. (Tho many call some of the stuff we do ‘HD’ because it’s better then what many think is normal for webstreams).
We’ve found the regular dual core’s with at least 4meg cache and 2gig of RAM is fine for most feeds upto 640x480 at 1500kbps video rate. (with say a 320x200 backup at 200kbps video rate). The i7’s will be nice if we ever do go with real HD, but very few of our end-users can actually handle a constant stream coming in at greater then 2mbps.
As for our events, we do just about anything. A few months ago we did a private stream so a movie director could remote-direct his film since he was having travel issues. Got a golf tournament coming up this week where we’ll be handling the live streaming of press events. Sometimes do local band ‘concerts’, etc. 95% of what we do are all one-off type events. Only a couple of customers who stream all the time ,or have constant on-demand type content coming from us.
–Chris