How Do I Estimate My Streaming Usage?
When planning a streaming project it's important to know how much bandwidth you're going to use as this ultimately dictates how much it will cost.
Streaming usage is measured in GB (Gigabytes) and separated out into Storage (the size of the files you have uploaded to your library) and Bandwidth (the amount of data that is transmitted through your account for streaming).
Storage
Storage is easy to estimate, just look at the file size of any videos you want to add to your account for hosting your On-Demand video. Keep in mind that we automatically compress your video files (without losing quality) by up to 80% to make them smaller, so you probably need a lot less than you think.
If you're Live Streaming only, you will require very little storage.
Bandwidth
For On-Demand video, the amount of bandwidth required will depend on the size of a video and how many times it is viewed. Each time a video is viewed the video is transmitted to the viewer. So, if a video is 10MB and it is viewed 100 times it will use 1GB of bandwidth. You can check the size of your optimised video files in your asset library.
For Live Streaming, it's a little more complicated to estimate as it is dependent on a few factors; Bitrate, Viewers and Duration (mins per viewer).
- Bitrate: This is the quality at which you are broadcasting video and is controlled in your encoder settings. The higher the bitrate, the better the quality and the more bandwidth you will use.
- Viewers: This is the number of people you expect to watch your live stream. There is no limit to how many viewers you can have, but more viewers mean more bandwidth.
- Duration: This is how long you expect each viewer to watch your broadcast. If you are running a ticketed event, in most cases you can safely assume that each ticket equates to 1 viewer watching for the entire duration. However, if you are running longer broadcasts (like 24/7 TV) or multiple broadcasts you should think about how long each viewer is realistically going to tune in and use minutes per viewer to get your estimate.
Once you know these 3 things you can input them into the calculator below and get an estimate for your live stream. We recommend running a few scenarios based on different broadcast quality (not everything needs to be in full HD) and viewer behaviours.
