I am thinking about attempting to produce a live broadcast of an event to the internet.

Most likely 3 or 4 cameras, live switching and instant replay capabilities. On the production end I can pretty much just rent a standard flypack, where I am gray is on the conversion to a streaming format. Specifically what equipment is necessary to do the high and low bandwidth conversions on site as well as how to distribute the stream, whether satellite internet connections would be quick enough or whether I would need a hard t3 or something like that.

Anyone have experience along these lines?

-K

a simple PC will do the job for encoding.
depending what the video signal is made of, you will need some hardware to convert.
If you got a composite signal, a simple capture card will fit, but take care to make sure it is compatible with the encoder (the latest windows media encoder is very finnicky on that matter)
once converted, you send it to a server (stream server). A upstream of 512Kb/s to 1 Mb/s should be enough (you just send one stream).
You will need to buy this service from a streaming company.
they will provide you with the info needed.(akamai for example)
or this one
http://www.upstreamnetworks.com/land/live-windows-streaming.shtm?_kk=live%20streaming%20company&_kt=cf22ecdb-f273-4003-83ac-bd9cd94b48b8&gclid=CJC91Z2z8osCFSoMQgodXFRMVQ
Preferrably, windows media format (encoder is free, codec is great and all PC user will play it easily)
you can set a web page somewhere embedding the code for mediaplayer so user need nothing to do.
You have to know that live streaming is not really live, since there is a delay (up to 1 minute) between the live and what the user receive.

Thanks Grioud, just the type of lead I needed!