Yesterday was the first live test of our EC2 automation, and it worked beautifully. One thing I discovered was that when the Wowza servers shut down, Flash Media Encoder simply attempts to reconnect to the server until it succeeds. This is very helpful, since I can just leave the VT5 system on a loop or on the program feed, and as soon as the servers are ready, they’ll start broadcasting.
That way, if something happens and nobody shows up, we’ll at least have something going on the stream.
If you’re using an unattended encoder, you can also take advantage of this (and even schedule start/stop of the encoder software, but it doesn’t have to be timed exactly to the server start/stop.