sticky situation with audio streaing

i am building a website that is for a audio book labrary. i want to be able to stream the audio over the web but not let people download it from my site. here is the catch however i need to be able to have the option to play the audio at higher speeds ie 2x normal playback and so on. i have already figued out that if we use a 24k bitrate the files will be small enough to be streamed on a modem connection. i also am looking to the future when i run out of server space can i go to a nother hosting co and put the rest of the files and pages on their server so that they can be accessed. i really would not want to have to use a media server sinc ethey are so expensive.

please help

ps we are loking at possibly hundreds of hours of audio available to be listened to

Well, you can't use mp3 because a savvy user like myself can (and will) intercept the .m3u, open it with notepad, and just go ahead and grab the audio file. mp3.com along with many other sites deceptively made the illusion of "stream only" mp3 files, where the above has always been true, always will be true. I never saw a stream only mp3 file.

Which leaves you with the less desirable option of dealing mostly with Real Media's RealAudio format. I loathe RealMedia, the company, as well as Real Audio, the format ... so I can't offer specifics even if I know them I deny that knowledge!

But I can tell you you'll need to license a realmedia server, where you can put an mp3 on practically any website and stream it (like my site for example, which has hours of music).

Now you have a condundrum!