Please let us know if you could help or know any one who could.

Regarding clients… well, no good answer here bro! Basically, there are people out there who don’t like open-source, mainly because it’s expensive and/or dangerous. For example, currently, it’s expensive and hard to find an FMS consultant. They certainly aren’t coming out of the woodwork compared to Java developers. It’s even worse with Red5 cause she’s so new. I know you’ve got a following on OSFlash, but it’s hard for me to pin down an applicable, competent community size yet, ya know?

So, some companies don’t want to be left out on the cold. A lot pay consultants insane fee’s to make themsevles feel more comfortable. Like, the same dudes who pay for Windows and .NET solutions vs. Linux & PHP. The consultants selling the packaged solutions sometimes do better sales. While some may find it easier to sell open source solutions on merit alone, a lot of companies don’t sell on price. As such, the “open source is cheaper argument” doesn’t ring true with them, and thus they have no qualms paying large fee’s because they recognize all the support they are getting with those solutions. They want large, older companies behind their technology. It helps them have trust.

Support obviously is questionable, but on paper in sale’s meetings it gives the suits warm fuzzy feelings, ya see?

Same argument can be made against Ruby on Rails vs. Java Spring & Hibernate, ColdFusion vs. .NET, Perl vs. C. It’s not just open source vs. proprietary, or free vs. pay, but a combination of the services that surround the technologies, and their perception inside a company.

For example, one of the con’s to Flex was it was from Macromedia. A server-side technology from a ’small’ company didn’t score a lot of points with people who traditionally were used to Oracle n’ friends. I personally don’t understand the mentaility of those poeple, but I do recognize the reality of it existing. Adobe’s acquisition helped since they are a bigger company, but their server-side offerings aren’t well known compared to Microsoft, Sun, and IBM for example.

So… perception. FMS, pay, big company, services around it, make you feel secure by spending more money.

I don’t really care which one they use, I just want my RSO’s…

Great suggestions! These of course are very useful for us developing Red5 as well.

I have thought about providing a way to deploy content to mobile devices using 3GP and or RTSP. That shouldn’t be too hard to do given our infrastructure. The main hurdle would be the encoding/decoding legal issues surrounding On2’s VP6. Perhaps Adobe will have better luck doing that sort of thing given that they are already licensing the codec from them.

The SMS idea is cool too. Assuming that there is a decent Java API for doing this sort of thing (Just googled and found this: http://www.objectxp.com/products/jSMS/ ), then hooking it up with Red5 should be cake.

I’m also curious to hear why some of your clients might not be down with Red5. It seems to me that if you want a lightweight RTMP solution that supports server-side scripting with a low cost license arrangement (free), then Red5 would be a great solution for you/them.