Drupal Hosts : Recipe for a Drupal dedicated server with own hosted streaming audio and video?

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This is a drupal question asked by besjon on 09 April 2009

I’ve been experimenting with a few different solutions but am going around in circles. Help!!!

We need to host Gigs of audio files (currently in MP3 and WMV formats, but we would like to convert them to MP3s on upload).

Each week we will add a bunch of long audio lectures and will also eventually be posting videos. Since each audio/video file will be at least one hour long we need to stream the files so viewers can jump around their timelines without having to download the whole media file first (we also want them to have the option to download the file).

Also, we can not use external Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) since our orthodox religious audience members use filtering software/firewalls which need to whitelist our specific host. This means we need to host and stream all the audio/video files ourselves.

We are looking at dedicated server solutions and would like any guidance/recommendations on:
1) Picking a company to build/manage a dedicated server optimized for Drupal and this type of application
2) Hardware configurations
3) Which Drupal modules to use
4) What streaming server software to use
5) Any additional info you can think of

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