How much web server bandwidth is required for a video streaming site?

5 Responses

1. just "JR"

   April 19th, 2011 at 9:46 pm

   1
   

   We are talking of STREAMING (real time video), as opposed to "Video downloads" (NOT real time)
   You should look at TWO things:
   - The monthly bandwidth (the TOTAL of kb, Mb sent per month) and
   - The instant Bandwith (How many kb/Mb?sec the server is capable of uploading. This will define the maximum number of CONCURRENT visitors).
   Assuming that you stream at 150k/s, to 1000 simultaneous visitors, you need a bandwith of 150,000 kb/sec – 150 Mb/sec – and a server capable out issuing that. This is where your costs are important: that link can only be achieved by fiber optics and very fast machines.
   The total bandwidth, at that stage, become irrelevant.
   Say you have an instant bandwidth of 500kb/s: you can only have 3 visitors at once. If you have 4, your server is overloaded, and the streaming will be braking up! If you have these 4 visitors for a few minutes in a whole month, your monthly bandwidth will be still nothing, but you will have 4 disappointed visitors.

2. Computer guy

   April 19th, 2011 at 9:33 pm

   2
   

   It really depends on the size of the videos. If you’re going to be streaming large video files to 1,000 users, go with more bandwith.

3. Gergy008

   April 19th, 2011 at 9:38 pm

   3
   

   100 Tb a month should be enough.

4. Colanth

   April 19th, 2011 at 10:16 pm

   4
   

   Multiply the size of the files you’ll be hosting by the number of downloads per month you expect. If the files are around 1GB, 1TB should be enough for 1,000 downloads/month. But if each user downloads one video per day, you’re looking at around 30TB/month.

5. Kelpie Media

   April 19th, 2011 at 10:56 pm

   5
   

   Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a good bet as it scales the bandwidth depending on user base and frequency. It’s not the cheapest but you wouldn’t need to worry about running out of bandwidth.