A few years back, I was called by a friend to advise his bosses on providing live streaming. This was back in the early 2000s, so it wasn't as easy as it is now. I'd had some experience through researching it, and advising my own employer.
As part of the project, I'd been asked to put together a demo.
So, I met my friend at his office one hot Saturday morning. Made slightly worse by the fact that not only was I wearing a heavy suit (don't usually wear a suit for work), but I'd also been out for quite a heavy drinking session with the very same friend the night before, so we both had hangovers.
I turned up at his office, and he let me in. We went to the server room so I could work. The Air Con had failed. Not sure what the temperature was because the maximum reading on the Thermometer on the wall was 40 Celsius. The mercury just reached the top of the tube, quite a bit above the 40 degrees level. It was hot enough that half the servers in the server room had overheated and turned off. We couldn't restart the Air Con, so we went around the building, opening every window we could find and getting every fan we could find. We wedged the door to the server room open, and just pointed all the fans at the door, turning every one on.
As the room was far too hot for humans (even walking in there resulted in being sweaty), and too hot for the servers, we explained to the security guard what we had done, then went for a full irish breakfast at the local O' Neills, all on expenses. No alcohol though, we both needed clear heads.
After about an hour, the temperature was still well above 40 degrees, but had decreased enough that we could start to bring the servers back online. My friend logged an emergency call with the Air Conditioning engineer, but they clearly have a different definition of Emergency, and had no engineers available for a couple of days.
So, with the servers back online and running (if a little too hot for comfort), I was able to set up a demonstration system that merely took the output of a local TV station and streamed it on their local network.
My friend demonstrated this to his bosses the next week. While they were happy with what they saw, they had concerns with the delay between the broadcast and the stream. They ran a small Auction TV channel, so as far as they were concerned, any millisecond of delay was a potential lost sale. I tried to explain that those milliseconds were unavoidable latency in streaming (after all, it takes a finite amount of time to receive the signal, then encode and stream it), but ultimately they decided not to go ahead due to the latency.
Actually, ultimately, they went bankrupt, but that's by the by. I still got paid for a day's consultancy, and the resulting pay bought me a very nice monitor that I'd otherwise have been unable to afford, so I was happy, if extremely sweaty when I finished.