I'm working on a project that will provide almost real-time coverage of a weekend event. We will be shooting for four days, and editing clips ranging from 2 to 60 minutes each. These will then be uploaded directly from the site to the hosting provided. Our current coverage is written articles plus photos - the video will be a new feature.

I would expect to have from 200-300 users watching the streams during the weekend, and probably a max of 20 people watching the archived videos after the weekend is over.

If this project is successful, we will use it for four major events, plus smaller weekly updates. I have more than adequate budget for this, so I'm am looking for an experienced service provided to avoid problems during the event.

Some recommedations so far include:
http://www.broadbandvideo.com/
http://www.audiovideoweb.com/

I would appreciate your experiences with these provides, as well as recommendations for other providers or other resources I can use to research alternatives.

you might want to also post this question to www.webhostingtalk.com, it's a major webmaster forum on the 'net.

i wonder if it's cheaper to present to the audience as a webcast, instead of just regular streaming video.

not trying to hijack the thread, but since you are paying the premium for true streaming(not cheap), perhaps you shouldn't limit your audience to just the quicktime format... both flash and windows media have been bundled with winxp from the beginning, and about ~70% of the computers on the internet run winxp... or perhaps you are covering a mac event?

please share your experiences with us, we'd love to hear how it went!

You may want to look at http://www.streaminghosting.com/. You can also to live event streaming when you want to. Like you, we use QuickTime format. We've used them for 6 months without a hiccup and it serves our PC visitors without complaint. Another nice thing is that you have a choice of Linux server platforms, compression services and a somewhat rare Flash Streaming service.