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There are many scenarios in which you can deploy Windows Media Services. Some examples to consider are: live product demonstrations, interactive television shows and movies, real-time customer conferences, breaking news stories, broadband video stores, and interactive training presentations. Once a piece of content is available over the Internet, the number of clients who can discover the content and request it is tremendous. When planning your deployment, you need to be aware of how your server will react in situations in which it is being inundated with requests for content. Following are some requirements you should keep in mind when assessing your deployment:
Windows Media Services is scalable by design to support a range of deployments, from small Internet radio stations that have hundreds of connection requests to large–scale streaming media Web sites that generate millions of requests. You can administer both groups of servers and publishing points and single servers and publishing points.
You may want to secure certain content on your Windows Media server in order to allow only specific clients to connect. Windows Media Services supports several authentication and authorization methods that allow you to control access to your content.
As more clients connect to your server, its available bandwidth can decrease. Additionally, the load on your server can overwhelm the processor's ability to serve the content. If you are streaming video content, investigate encoding using multiple–bit–rate video so that the bandwidth can gracefully scale down and up as necessary.