FMS, then Red5, now WebOrb.

They all offer streaming video!!!

Its no big secret that I like C# and .net, so you can imagine how excited I was to see streaming flash video in a .Net based Flash remoting package. I am a film student believe it or not. I even have the Uni degree to back it up (good for a job at Mc D's). Thats where I came from. My first job was to help setup and create streaming media back in the 2000's. Back in the windows media days. Thank-god for flash video is all I can say.

So what does WebOrbs server have. Well until Adobe or ON2 open the codec WebOrb will be stuck using flash video 7 encoding. But is does live streaming. You can make the standard issue video conference apps. Or you could get creative and make a skype or VOIP client to work on the web, that uses the server to do some grunt work and just stream video and sound down the wire to flash.

It also has flex messaging. Whats this messaging business then? Well say for example you have a graph that shows sales of your clients website. To have this live data you would have to poll the server for data right? wrong! the Flex client can subscribe to the service. And just as after you subscribe to playboy you recieve a lovely parcell of data when there is one ready. In our example when ever there is a sale, the server will SEND the data to the subscribed clients. COOL! now this is all available in Flash Media Server. But im a c# boy on wednesdays so Im pimping WebOrb today.

The whole package is nicely errrrr packaged with a wicked management console. go check it out. C# aint that far away from AS3 in syntax.

Or for a more logical look at what the WebOrb server is all about check out a much better explaination on Ryan's Stewarts post.