Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The data is delivered over a HTTP/HTTPS connection, so it can be also perfectly cached on server side or used in combination with an CDN. We are not in disagreement.
Nothing prevents you from doing this live either though, except maybe if you need very low latency.
Of course, I'm on AWS using SSDs, MediaStore, and CloudFront (as a testbed; we use medialive for production). If you're on a spinning disk you'll have contention and throughput issues (ie: you can't expect to write and read to that guy effectively).
I'd suggest dropping to 24fps, since you're not doing fast action sports. Also, use the Apple HLS authoring guidelines as a baseline for your bandwidth settings. Overall they seem to be pretty good.
As with any compression, high quality in is better, because it gives the encoders more data to work with.
360p is pretty worthless.
What you can try and do, if you want to ride the edge of legality, is start an unlisted youtube livestream then extract the m3u8 out of it and send it to your clients.