I don't bother with official streaming. It's a whole lot more effort and expense for very little gain. I use "helper" files to speed viewer launch time and let the file play as it downloads. For most situations this is good enough.

Render the file to RealMedia using .rm as the extension. Place this file in a web directory on any ol' web server. Create a text file with the same name as the media file (not necessary for it to be the same name, but it helps you remember which file it goes with), except with .ram as the extension. In this file type in the fully qualified URL of the .rm file (must start with http:// ... etc. and end in .rm). You can create this file in notepad or any text editor. Save this on the web server as well. From the web page, link to the .ram file.

What happens now is that when someone clicks on the link, they get the .ram file which is extremely tiny, probably under 100 bytes. The browser detects that it's RealMedia from the .ram extention, launches RealPlayer, and then tells RealPlayer to load the file from the URL containd in the .ram file. This means that RealPlayer launches as soon as possible rather than waiting for the large media file to finish downloading first and can start playing it as soon as it has buffered enough of the file.

For example: say that your media file is mymovie.rm and your website is http://www.mysite.com/. You would create a text file named mymovie.ram and it would contain http://www.mysite.com/mymovie.rm . The link would be something like this:

<a href=mymovie.ram>Watch my movie</a>

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Slightly unrelated note: RealMedia has a pretty bad rep and lots of folks will refuse to install the player. You may want to consider using Windows Media instead. Save the movie as a .wmv file and create a .wvx helper file in the same way as the .ram file is explained above. Better yet, offer both, and possibly a QuickTime .mov version as well.