Live Video Streaming - no computer at source?

I am not sure if this counts as a hardware or software question, but here goes:

We are trying to set up a streaming solution for multiple live cameras in various locations. The locations are bars and they are spread around the US, so we are trying to pursue options that don't require a computer at the source for the media encoding. We have looked at several standalone cameras and some media server units, but nothing seems to be quite what we need. Plus, there are some questions that aren't getting answered through phone calls to the manufacturers etc. I have looked on the Microsoft site, but there doesn't seem to be a media streaming forum that I could find. Search engines are yielding a lot of irrelevant results.

Does anyone here have experience with this sort of thing, or know of a good forum where I could get some info? I need to know if hardware exists that will send windows media encoded streams, or whether a remote server could handle encoding streams from 50 different cameras... stuff along those lines.

Any help is appreciated.