How to choose: answering the main questions
CPU or GPU for transcoding?
A single 1080p stream in 3–4 quality levels consumes 4–6 CPU cores — or 1/10th of a GPU with NVENC. For three or more simultaneous streams, a GPU pays for itself immediately: an L4 or RTX A2000 can encode dozens of streams.
What is needed to stream to 1,000 viewers?
1080p ≈ 5 Mbps per viewer → 5 Gbps per thousand. This means 10GbE and colocation in a data center with a reliable connection; edge caching nodes reduce the load when viewers are geographically dispersed.
Media library storage?
One hour of 1080p ≈ 2–4 GB: a studio library quickly grows into tens of TBs. A combination of NVMe (for editing/hot delivery) + HDD RAID6 (for archiving) is the standard for media servers.