I know you already bought one, but...
I think that if one wants to experiment with webcasting, there are plenty of free applications ou there that make it easy to do so.
You can webcast through Shoutcast(mp3), Windows Media(WMA-WMV), and Real Media(RM-RAM)
I don't know about Real recently, but they at least used to have free versions of their encoder and server available. Same for Windows media. I am fairly certain that Windows media encoder is stil available for free.
And Of Course, Shoutcast is stil available for free, with all the software you need to encode and stream with.
There are also those who stream via Quicktime.
Personally I like the Shoutcast the best, because WMA don't play well on macs or other non-windows machines. The opposite is true for Quicktime, which works well on Apples/Macs but don't play to easily or well on Windows PCs.
The Shoutcast seems to work fairly reliably on both platoforms, as MP3 will play in Windows media player, Real player, Winamp and iTunes.
The Telos encoder looks like a nice unit, but taking a closer look, you still need to use a content server.
For Shoutcast I rescued an old 400 MHz PC out of the junk pile, Did a fresh install of XP, installed winamp, the shoutcast encoder plugin and the shoutcast server. That was it. The same machine works well as an encoder and server.
The Computer has a 5Gig drive, 128Mb RAM, and 400MHz pentium chip. It has the cheap Creative Labs sound card. It works really well. If I were making a serious attempt at webcasting I would encode and serve from separate machines, but for personal experimentation, you really don't need anything all that fancy.
What is nice about a unit like the Telos is that you don't have to worry about the thing crashing on you, being hacked, or getting viruses. These are all things that you do need to consider when using a software encoder like Shoutcast.
So, for anyone out there that wants to experiment with streaming and not have to pay a lot of money, there are resources available. It can be fun. However if you are making a serious go at webcasting, then this Telos unit looks like a great deal!
