There are pretty much three major costs to consider when it comes to video online. They are storage, delivery and encoding. Storage is pretty cheap. S3 starts

There are pretty much three major costs to consider when it comes to video online. They are storage, delivery and encoding. Storage is pretty cheap. S3 starts at $0.14 per GB for the first TB and then drops to $0.125 for the next 50TB and so on. There might be some cheaper cloud storage options out there. If you don't need the durability that S3 provides, you can use their reduced redundancy option which is like 40% cheaper. There are other cloud storage provides out there worth considering like Rackspace's Cloud Files, although I think S3 is the cheapest. CDNs also often include their own storage so that might also be something to consider. You might be able to get a good rate if you committed to a minimum storage and bandwidth package. If you wanted, you could even go the route of building your own storage units (http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/ http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v...) which presents it's own pros and cons. Delivery also isn't that expensive. CloudFront, for instance, charges $0.12/GB for the first 10TB and $0.08/Gb for the next 40TB. If you're streaming over 10TB per month, you can start to get discounts by committing to monthly minimums. Again, there are other providers out there, such as limelight and akamai, but as far as I can tell, they don't publish their prices. That usually means you probably need upfront commitments with them. Because of that, there is probably a lot of room to negotiate the price of bandwidth. Delivery will most likely be your highest cost just because of the volume unless you don't plan to be streaming that much video. Lastly there is encoding. Encoding can either be done by yourself on your own serves or through one of the many providers online. Doing it yourself takes a bunch of time to figure out all of the quirks of all of the different video and audio codecs and containers. It's not a fun process, but ultimately, if you can get it right, it might be cheaper. There are a bunch of transcoding services out there. They have different pricing models so you'll want to make sure that the model fits your use case. For instance, Zencoder charges for the minutes of output video created but something like Encoding.com charge by GB (Combined input and output file sizes). If you're dealing with a lot of short, but really large, videos, the Zencoder model would fit better. If your files are small, but really long, (like webinars) the Encoding.com model might work better.