Have you looked for inspiration in Red5 or Wowza?
I had used Wowza to take multiple rtsp streams (from cctv cameras) and properly stream to multiple clients (Flash h.264 player and iOS streaming).
I had used Wowza to take multiple rtsp streams (from cctv cameras) and properly stream to multiple clients (Flash h.264 player and iOS streaming).
That's not-so-simple. The VLAN folks have written some excellent SDKs for their VLCKit engine, but it is quite "heavy." I've also messed around with ffmpeg, but that's not much lighter, and doesn't easily work on iOS.
Another consideration for iOS is battery use. Video tends to be a bit "piggy," when it comes to power usage.
I am sort of waiting to see who comes out of the scrum. Video is just too damn important to be allowed to remain the rather chaotic mess it's in now.