Pricing for video content

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Andrew Whitney

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Jan 20, 2021, 9:50:04 AM1/20/21
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We are looking to host a small amount of video, approx 300mb which will be streamed to iOS and Android mobile devices.
This is an art project and will probably have a limited user base of no more than a 100 users per month.
If 100 users stream the videos fully I'm assuming a cost of around 300x100 = 30,000 mb or 30Gigabytes.

Which @ .15 per GIg = $4.5 per month - is this a correct cost estimation ?

Sam Stern

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Jan 20, 2021, 9:57:35 AM1/20/21
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Hey Andrew,

Let's take a look at the pricing page:
Screen Shot 2021-01-20 at 2.52.00 PM.png

  • GB Stored - So your video is 0.3GB s storing that per month is 0.3 x 0.026 = $0.0078 or about one penny.  However the free tier is 5GB/month so this would be totally free.
  • GB Downloaded - Your video will be watched 100x a month so as you said that's 30GB per month. 30 x 0.12 = $3.60 per month. However you get 1GB/day free downloads.  That's about 3 users per day free.  100 users a month is ~3.3 users per day so on most days you'll be paying $0 and on days when you get 4 users you'd pay (1.2GB - 1.0GB) x (0.12/GB) = $0.024, so about 2 cents a day on those days
  • Upload operations - looks like you won't be anywhere near the free limit here.
  • Download operations - same, you will have only a handful.
So for your project I'd estimate that it would be totally free or less than $1 a month in the "worst" case.  I say "worst" because something tells me you'd be happy to pay $1 if more people viewed your video!

Hope that helps,
Sam

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Peter Nikolow

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Jan 21, 2021, 8:04:28 AM1/21/21
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Just to update Sam excellent answer.

If you split your video to HLS segments with few resolutions (320, 480, 720, 1080, 4K) with adaptive bitrate for video and audio.
Then your storage will be a little bit higher - like 700-800MB or even 1Gb. But also fit on a free tier.

Main benefit will be for mobile users - because devices with small screen won't download FullHD video file and they will start with 320 or 480.
This can be easiest seen on YouTube with their resolution switch.

So in general this is also beneficial for you because it will make your traffic bill even lower. 

And here is tutorial how to make this with free & open source tools:
https://docs.peer5.com/guides/production-ready-hls-vod/

Regards,

Peter



Peter Nikolow

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Jan 21, 2021, 8:22:47 AM1/21/21
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I forgot... 

It's also possible to create a Firebase Cloud Function that will get master video file from storage, convert them and return HLS files to storage.

This will be useful because converting is a CPU intensive operation and will be slow on desktop computers.
But on Firebase servers the same operation will be executed much faster because of their server CPUs.

Peter
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