[HillRat]

Yeah, you can optimize pricing by going through the cloud providers themselves (you can hit about $0.025/GB plus cache fill charges for small requirements), but, to be honest, if a user is having trouble with $3,500/year, they aren't in a position to build and maintain a whole video serving solution out of AWS (let alone figure out how the billing even works with cloud providers), so I stuck with turnkey CDNs that bring their own digital asset management features.

(Also, the economics shift radically if you're doing tens of petabytes a month; you're comfortably under $0.01 per GB at that tier, and the largest players -- major streamers and game companies -- can push their prices under $0.001. It's basically the folks who push terabytes who are getting hammered.)

[DanielBMarkham]

Related question: I do hour-long, 4-10 party video conference calls about once a week. Each one might have between 10-200 viewers.

This seems like a good area to get screwed, ie, pay a huge difference between a COTS black-box solution and just doing it myself. Last week I started playing around with setting up a RTMP server.

But hell, I'm still back to bandwidth. Are you saying there's a way to directly cache realtime streaming video on the cloud providers, skip the store-and-publish route entirely?

One thing I was amazed with was the huge amount of money a company could spend going into this area without doing some serious research. There are too many options and too many variables for most non-tech folks to consider.

No problem if you don't want to answer. I thought it might be something other HNers would want to know.

[HillRat]

To be honest, live streaming isn't something I've estimated before, so I wouldn't be able to give you an informed opinion. I do know that Cloudflare, at least, can save livestreamed content for later replay, so there's probably an efficiency there you can make use of. Whether they're cost-efficient for you is another question; as you say, it's easy to stumble into massive bills without realizing it until it's too late.

[PaywallBuster]

you can probably find "live streaming" services

- they're unlikely to use public cloud providers (prohibitively expensive for high bandwidth use cases)

- they have more customers with similar needs to you

- its still a managed service, let them take care of it

the other comment already mentions Cloudflare, you could also consider https://bunny.net?ref=6akqfap0uq which is a small CDN provider focusing on cost effective solution (10x cheaper than AWS/GCP easily)

[Nextgrid]

Hosting video files on lots of inexpensive servers or even VPSes with unmetered traffic will get you quite far, especially with subscriber-only content where the demand is predictable and capped.