If you are planning on streaming to more than just a few devices at a time then you probably will need something more robust than just one or two servers.
As to confusion, m3u is a playlist type, m3u8 is a playlist type supporting utf-8 international characters. M3u8 files are most commonly used for broadcasting live streaming video to Iphone, Ipad and Roku devices, whereas m3u files are mostly used for streaming mp3 files.
There are quite a few options for streaming, including Akamai and others, check the list here:
viewtopic.php?f=34&t=34726I think there are many more options since that thread was first started, but many of those options use companies like Akamai, Limelight, Bitgravity and Level3 anyway, but they provide a front end to make things easier for some people than going directly through those CDN's.
- Joel