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From my experiences, if we assume that Youtube's bandwidth costs are similar to what Akamai charges for an extremely large video site, and their claim of 1 bill

From my experiences, if we assume that Youtube's bandwidth costs are similar to what Akamai charges for an extremely large video site, and their claim of 1 billion videos viewed per day is correct, they're probably paying about $5-10 million per month. Obviously, if their bandwidth is cheaper than Akamai, adjust those numbers accordingly. And it might be larger if 720p HD being the default mode sticks (those have 4 times the bitrate of their regular videos).

mrkurt 17y ago
The whole point of the article is that they're not really paying for bandwidth like you would if you were buying from Akamai. When you peer with someone, you rarely pay by the mb. It's more like a direct crossover connection from your router to theirs in some peering facility.
- DarkShikari 17y ago
  The reason bandwidth costs money is not because ISPs and Akamai and other CDNs are greedy, it's because the infrastructure behind it costs money. Building your own inftrastructure doesn't make bandwidth free, it just eliminates the cut that the provider normally takes. Also, Akamai doesn't charge by the megabyte either, they charge by the megabit per second, as does most anyone once you start dealing with Facebook or Youtube-size loads.
  - mrkurt 17y ago
    Yes, that's what I meant when I said "mb", perhaps 95th percentile billing would have been more explicit. And when you start dealing with Facebook or Youtube sized loads, you generally start peering rather than just buying transit from various providers. When you peer, you no longer pay a 95th. You work out a peering deal with some provider you send a lot of traffic to and effectively connect directly to them in some shared facility. Some providers will charge you a 95th rate when you peer, but even then it's vastly cheaper than what you'd be paying for normal transit.
  - kierank 17y ago
    Generally with CDNs you get charged per GB until a certain amount. Then it'll depend on your specific contract whether its GB or Mbps; there's no hard and fast rule.
  - Teulon 17y ago
    The people who run that infrastructure can also help run other infrastructure, or the bandwidth can be used for more than just YouTube. That reduces the cost more.
kierank 17y ago
From my experiences, if we assume that Youtube's bandwidth costs are similar to what Akamai charges for an extremely large video site There's an "Akamai markup" which is a well known thing that Akamai charge for the heritage (somewhat analogous with the so-called "Mac-tax" except the Akamai "tax" is agreed to exist). A better comparison would be CDN pricing for Limelight or CDNetworks, the other two big players. It's worth bearing in mind that a lot of peering contracts for major carriers (but not necessarily Tier 1 - for example BT, Telefonica etc) depend on having a backbone - Akamai doesn't have a backbone, their backbone is the internet. Also Google only do HTTP, so no Flash RTMP or Microsoft streaming which you effectively subsidise with an http product from a CDN.
- camwest 17y ago
  They actually don't use HTTP, they use RTMP, try it yourself: Load up a Youtube video and scrub to the middle of the video. It will load to that very point even if it hasn't buffered that far yet.
  - kierank 17y ago
    They use HTTP with an addition in their servers similar to this plugin: http://h264.code-shop.com/trac http://h264.code-shop.com/trac to do HTTP scrubbing. Google also used Akamai for its Google Live broadcast which indicated that their network couldn't do RTMP (at the time).

mrkurt 17y ago

The whole point of the article is that they're not really paying for bandwidth like you would if you were buying from Akamai. When you peer with someone, you rarely pay by the mb. It's more like a direct crossover connection from your router to theirs in some peering facility.

DarkShikari 17y ago
The reason bandwidth costs money is not because ISPs and Akamai and other CDNs are greedy, it's because the infrastructure behind it costs money. Building your own inftrastructure doesn't make bandwidth free, it just eliminates the cut that the provider normally takes. Also, Akamai doesn't charge by the megabyte either, they charge by the megabit per second, as does most anyone once you start dealing with Facebook or Youtube-size loads.
- mrkurt 17y ago
  Yes, that's what I meant when I said "mb", perhaps 95th percentile billing would have been more explicit. And when you start dealing with Facebook or Youtube sized loads, you generally start peering rather than just buying transit from various providers. When you peer, you no longer pay a 95th. You work out a peering deal with some provider you send a lot of traffic to and effectively connect directly to them in some shared facility. Some providers will charge you a 95th rate when you peer, but even then it's vastly cheaper than what you'd be paying for normal transit.
- kierank 17y ago
  Generally with CDNs you get charged per GB until a certain amount. Then it'll depend on your specific contract whether its GB or Mbps; there's no hard and fast rule.
- Teulon 17y ago
  The people who run that infrastructure can also help run other infrastructure, or the bandwidth can be used for more than just YouTube. That reduces the cost more.

kierank 17y ago

From my experiences, if we assume that Youtube's bandwidth costs are similar to what Akamai charges for an extremely large video site There's an "Akamai markup" which is a well known thing that Akamai charge for the heritage (somewhat analogous with the so-called "Mac-tax" except the Akamai "tax" is agreed to exist). A better comparison would be CDN pricing for Limelight or CDNetworks, the other two big players. It's worth bearing in mind that a lot of peering contracts for major carriers (but not necessarily Tier 1 - for example BT, Telefonica etc) depend on having a backbone - Akamai doesn't have a backbone, their backbone is the internet. Also Google only do HTTP, so no Flash RTMP or Microsoft streaming which you effectively subsidise with an http product from a CDN.

camwest 17y ago
They actually don't use HTTP, they use RTMP, try it yourself: Load up a Youtube video and scrub to the middle of the video. It will load to that very point even if it hasn't buffered that far yet.
- kierank 17y ago
  They use HTTP with an addition in their servers similar to this plugin: http://h264.code-shop.com/trac http://h264.code-shop.com/trac to do HTTP scrubbing. Google also used Akamai for its Google Live broadcast which indicated that their network couldn't do RTMP (at the time).