e-cast, New Zealand's Premier Video Hosting & Streaming Service

Technology
The e-cast video storage and server equipment is located in the secure ICONZ Data Centre in Auckland.

e-cast maintains two complementary connections to the Internet:
- One through ICONZ with a 100MB connection
- An additional 1GB fibre cable direct to the Auckland Peering Exchange

Our encoding, storage and Internet server hardware and software use the latest internationally recognised IT and video standards. These ensure our services meet the demands of modern consumers and operate on the Internet, iPods, 3G mobile phones and DVB-H devices.

To afford reliable and continuous service, the e-cast equipment is:
- Fed by a triple-redundant and fully filtered power supply
- Maintained at a constant fan-forced 21°C temperature
- Maintained 24 hours a day, seven days per week

The video files are held on Apple Xserve RAID storage arrays that use high-performance hot swappable Ultra ATA Drive Modules. Xserve RAID architecture is optimised for RAID5 to maximise throughput and back up video files in case of equipment failure. Our Flash Media Interactive Server utilises the very latest technology from Adobe to provide both video streaming of Flash video files and also MPEG-4 files encoded using the H.264 video codec. The Flash Media Server uses the latest RTMP and RTMPS technology to deliver secure video streams intelligently. It is capable of negotiating firewalls that might otherwise block streams, and features automatic bandwidth detection to monitor individual user connection speeds and make dynamic changes to the way video is delivered to them.

The e-cast Flash Media Interactive Server software is running on an Apple X-Serve with 64-bit Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors allowing seamless integration to our existing X-SAN RAID storage volumes through our high-speed fibre channel network.

QuickTime is also offered using an Xserve G5 Cluster Node Streaming Server configured to also provide on-demand media streaming over the Internet or IP network using RTP/RTSP or HTTP protocols.