I currently am testing an odd solution utilizing vmix.

Here's my problem:

2 Mbs bandwidth at the remote location
computer mixing 4 sd camcorders for live broadcast to windows 8.1/ I7 4th gen, 16 gigs ram, nvidia cpu, vmix latest version
windows expression encoder 4

server (at a different geographic location)
server 2008 enterprise 64 bit, dual 4 core xeonon 2.8Ghz
vmix latest version (15.x)
windows media services server 2008
IIS Smooth Streaming server
microsoft expression encoder 4

seeing there's only 2Mbs total bandwidth between the two machine, the best I can send is a 1.5Mbs
what I want to do is then grab the 1.5Mbs encoded stream and re-encode it to silverlight here's how I'm trying:

I mix onsite with vmix
use expression encoder to grab from the vmix virtual device and send to windows media services a 1.5mbs vc sd stream (legacy users pull from this with various cellphones and windows media player.
on the server I want to use vmix to pull the stream from media services and then expressions encoder pull it from the vmix virtual device and encode it to the IIS smooth streaming server..

all this works until I get to the vmix pull from windows media services, it responds "unsupported stream format" path is rtsp://www.tvbydemand.com/live2 if I play this with the servers media player it plays perfectly..

Also if I load a prerecorded file as an input into vmix on the server the expressions encoder pulls from the vmix virtual device and sends to iis smooth streaming perfectly, so the broken link is getting the rtsp feed into vmix on the server..

I know this seems very complex and if anyone has a better solution for me to be able to provide a high quality 1.5 rtsp and html feed to my end users as well as an IIS smooth streaming feed at the same time I'd love hear it! I'm open to try anything at least once... or if I can get this procedure fixed I'd be happy as well..

Also I'm trying to use all windows servers and not wowza, although if I can't solve this issue I will have no choice I guess..

yeah pricey is an understatement.. I could just go the wowza route for far less then 1/3rd the price.. or hire a Linux engineer to write a custom solution and get an I7 laptop to run the remote and a new dual processor quad core server for less then that one device..