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It's purely a scale problem. On the "Revenue" side you will quite probably need to have enough eyeballs that advertisers come to you directly to display ads an
by matt-p 2y ago
It's purely a scale problem.
On the "Revenue" side you will quite probably need to have enough eyeballs that advertisers come to you directly to display ads and do so in volume.
On the "Costs" side you'd want to be big enough that you can just store your content in ~3 of your own datacentres, cache the "hot content" in a site or two per country then give away caches to ISPs (who will gladly host them in their own network for free).
Biggest cost will be bandwidth/streaming servers. Encoding/storage is comparatively cheap. If you were small you would likely start to do this from a few 100Gbps dedicated servers per continent. https://www.fdcservers.net/configurator?fixedFilter=15&fixedFilterType=bandwidth_option https://www.fdcservers.net/configurator?fixedFilter=15&fixed... If we set an average of 3-4Mbps per stream you're looking at each server handling 20,000 videos served and the hourly cost of the server would be around say $4/hour so you're looking at around $0.20 per 1000 video hours in theory, in practice it will be higher. Worst case closer to $0.50 per 1000 video hours due to utilisation rates.
- vsuperpower2020 2y agoIt may be different at this scale, but in my experience fast-ish redundant file storage has always been extremely expensive even at lower storage sizes, while getting a 100 Gbps line is relatively cheap.
- matt-p 2y agoit's different at scale, and you mostly don't need SSDs since you have cache boxes, most your storage is videos that are very rarely used. You're looking at probably a rack of SSDs for every 5-10 racks of spinning disks X 3 datacentres. Even that would give you approx 50-90PB of usable storage (replicated so it's in all three sites) for a few tens of thousands a month. Even if you just put it all on S3 infrequent, which would be one of the most expensive ways of doing it, it's still not really expensive compared to serving the content.
- dist1ll 2y agoAren't big players colocating their CDNs at internet exchanges? Bandwidth should be essentially free for content delivery.
- matt-p 2y agoYes, exactly. I'm saying that even if you're too small for that it's still pretty cheap.