As an entertaining, mildly silly calculation: Netflix, at “best” settings, streams 1-7 GB/hour [0]. At the highest public tier for AWS EC2 egress, that’s 5-35

As an entertaining, mildly silly calculation: Netflix, at “best” settings, streams 1-7 GB/hour [0]. At the highest public tier for AWS EC2 egress, that’s 5-35 cents/hour, which would not be amazing for Netflix’s bottom line. CloudFront is a bit better at 2-14 cents/hr. Of course, Netflix surely doesn’t pay AWS retail prices, and Netflix doesn’t use AWS for streaming data anyway. But this does mean that any aspiring creator or startup that wants to try to collect its 50 cents/hr or so should either not deploy its streaming source in a big name cloud or should design it so it can be migrated off the big clouds quickly if the service takes off. (Cloudflare R2 appears to be quite good for this purpose. So is a small fleet of collocated machines. A single low-end modern server streaming out 10Gbps accounts for several hundred dollars per hour of revenue, and you need to be truly successful indeed before anything resembling AWS’s internal infrastructure is needed to keep the pipes fed. Keep in mind that Netflix blogs about how their servers pump out streams at 40x that rate.) [0] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87