> I heard they are paying something between $0.20 (eu/us) to $10 (exotic) per TB based on the region of the world where the traffic is coming from They're like

> I heard they are paying something between $0.20 (eu/us) to $10 (exotic) per TB based on the region of the world where the traffic is coming from They're likely paying even less. $0.20/TB ($0.0002/GB) is aggressive but at their scale, connectivity and per-machine throughput, it's lower still. A few points to take home: - They [Netflix, YT, etc] model cost by Mbps - that is, the cost to deliver traffic at a given peak. You have to provision for peaks, or take a reliability/quality of experience hit, and for on-demand video your peaks at usually 2x your average. - This can effectively be "converted" into a $/TB rate but that's an abstraction, and not a productive way to model. Serving (e.g.) 1000PB (1EB) into a geography at a peak of 3Tbps per day is much cheaper than serving it at a peak of 15Tbps. - Netflix, more so than most others, benefits from having a "fixed" corpus at any given moment. Their library is huge, but (unlike YouTube) users aren't uploading content, they aren't doing live streaming or sports events, etc - and thus can intelligently place content to reduce the need to cache fill their appliances. Cheaper to cache fill if you can trickle most of it during the troughs as you don't need a big a backbone, peering links, etc. to do so. - This means that Netflix (rightfully!) puts a lot of effort into per-machine throughput, because they want to get as much user-facing throughput as possible from the given (space, power, cost) of a single box. That density is also attractive to ISPs, as it means that every "1RU of space" they give Netflix has a better ROI in terms of network cost reductions vs. others, esp. when combined with the fact that "Netflix works great" is an attractive selling point for users.