Does QuickTime Streaming Server have a nice user gui?

DSS/QTSS is not a "youtube" turnkey streaming server. Meaning there is no web gui front-end portal. The admin gui is the interface for DSS. There are also command line tools to administrate DSS/QTSS. It's a service that runs that provides mechanisms to stream media to supported players (quicktime, vlc, mplayer (I beleive), windows media (with envivio plugin), 3gp capable media players, and hopefully flash will allow RTSP), which allows for immediate playback of content and scrubbing of content.

You need to come up with your own way to manage the media on the front-end to your "viewers". Might I suggest a robust and capable CMS called drupal, with the video plugin and other tools it can provide for a great frontend to DSS/QTSS. You might even be able to come up with some cronjob mechanisms to automatically encode your media with ffmpeg, mpeg4ip, etc. So it automatically get's managed by the CMS.

I am sure Apple has a gui front-end up their sleeves, but I would tend to shy away from it unless it provided additional functionality like the weblog tool does with ldap integration.

AFIAK "Windows Media Server" and "Real Media Server" are not providing a content management "Web GUI Media Server" either. What you get with QTSS/DSS that you're not getting with Windows Media Server and Real Media Server is what I have quantified to be a greater amount of player ubiquity (the highest in reality is Flash, but you're stuck with Flash Media Server and On2 VP6 codec (which I think looks horrible)).

Just one thing to ask you, think of your customers (most the one's I am concerned with are students) and think of what they use to play music. Do they use a Zune? A Creative Nomad? Or do the use an iPod? Most people have ipods, I would think, and therefore use iTunes, and therefore have quicktime installed. Hmmmm... wait I can play almost any open source media format with quicktime, oh and wait I can stream just about any open source (streamable) media format with QTSS/DSS.

Oh did I mention I can run DSS on a variety of rock solid *nix distro's on off the shelf parts from my local electronics store. Can you say cheap streaming media server?

In the end it's all apple's and orange's to me. Yah windows is more pervasive, but you're going to be pigeon holed into using windows media formats (which are all proprietary), and dealing with an unstable server OS (no debating this one). With QTSS/DSS I can stream mpeg-4's or 3gp or if I so desired .mov. I don't particularly like the SpyWare install nature of real player and it's thousands upon thousands of updates, and version name changes, and this or that. I personally don't even have it installed, nor do I visit any website that uses it. I also think real's and windows media's video quality is so so (just my opinion).

h.264 is really where it's at, it's part of everything nowadays including production pipelines for movies, and in HD-DVD and BluRay DVD specs. Yah I am sure you can stream h.264 encoded .RM or .WMV (not sure if that's possible) but again your limited. I personally stream MPEG-4's (completely platform indpendent, and can be played back in almost all media players (including windows media player with the envivio plugin), and VLC which is free and can be installed on (windows, os x, linux).

The Killer combo for me is really, flash player (flash can now play mpeg-4's including h.264, but only for downloads) playing RTSP MPEG-4 h.264 encoded streams form DSS/QTSS (or some other blazingly fast and stable streaming server, there are other's out there, but DSS/QTSS seems pretty dang pervasive to me).

Are you saying that Flash 9+ doesn't play streaming mp4 or mov files in h.264 from QTSS? Thats new to me, I was planning for that solution, really. I still have another problem; how to add a auto generated selectable playlist from QTSS to the player's web window, alongside the movie.
Flash Media Server is to expensive for me.