Most people start out streaming from a laptop in the corner of the room, and it works right up until Windows decides to restart it. A hardware encoder is the box that ends that problem. It plugs into the mixer, it dials our servers by itself, and it comes back on its own when the power blinks. Six of them are below, split by whether you are putting out sound or pictures.
Sound goes in on a cable and comes out as a SHOUTcast or Icecast stream. You type four things into the box once, the server, the port, the mount point and the password, and then you stop thinking about it.
A camera goes in over HDMI or SDI and an RTMP stream comes out. What separates these three is where you need to be standing: outdoors on a phone network, behind a production desk, or back at the rack.
An encoder needs somewhere to send the stream, and that part is ours. Buying both from one company is the difference between a support answer and being told to ask the other supplier.
