Streaming Video: Too Costly?

If you're thinking of streaming video from your popular web site, please review your budget carefully.

If you're serving a 5-minute streaming video to dial-up (56K) users, your web site will serve around 2.1MB of data per visitor. So if 1,000 people view your video per month, that's a little over 2GB of bandwidth transfer per month.

Most web accounts come with 10 - 30 GB of monthly bandwidth, so if your video becomes quite popular and people return to your site to play and (gulp) re-play your video, then your webhost might temporarily shutdown your site.

Some webhosts will give you a large monthly allowance (i.e., 150GB), but will have a daily restriction (i.e., 5GB/day). That means your website will be inaccessible on certain days.

It would help if you can store your videos on webservers whose bandwidth cost is shouldered by altruistic organizations. I'll be looking for various places on the net that provide free storage and bandwidth for your video and audio files.

Then again, if it's free, then what's the catch?
[ First posted on 04/11/2005 by Manuel Viloria ]