I'm curious, how much bandwidth does a popular video take, assuming its encoded?
I picked a random Youtube video that was 5 minutes long, downloaded it in 1080p, 53MB in size. The video got 100,000 views, which takes 5TB to transfer. I'm not sure about other cloud platforms, but on DigitalOcean (I haven't found any reputable hosting thats cheaper) the transfer cost is $0.01/GB, so it would cost $53 dollars, which doesn't include CDN. If you made ate least $0.0005 per video watched, you would make up your bandwidth costs. You can probably 20x this price for CDN/other cloud providers, so if you were making at least a penny per view, you would break even.
Some simplifications made:
1) Didn't include peak bandwidth/if the pipe is big enough at peak hours.
2) Assumed all viewers watched the video from beginning to end, instead of stopping 20% of the way through.
Peer to peer driven distribution is underutilized. It allows indivuals to reach millions. However, if you make your money with advertisements, peer to peer distribution does not make sense.
I picked a random Youtube video that was 5 minutes long, downloaded it in 1080p, 53MB in size. The video got 100,000 views, which takes 5TB to transfer. I'm not sure about other cloud platforms, but on DigitalOcean (I haven't found any reputable hosting thats cheaper) the transfer cost is $0.01/GB, so it would cost $53 dollars, which doesn't include CDN. If you made ate least $0.0005 per video watched, you would make up your bandwidth costs. You can probably 20x this price for CDN/other cloud providers, so if you were making at least a penny per view, you would break even.
Some simplifications made:
1) Didn't include peak bandwidth/if the pipe is big enough at peak hours.
2) Assumed all viewers watched the video from beginning to end, instead of stopping 20% of the way through.