Enter Streaming Inputs
Use the fields below to estimate end-to-end monthly video delivery costs for OTT, education, enterprise, events, or media platforms.
Example Data Table
This sample scenario shows how the calculator behaves for a mid-scale streaming workload.
| Example Metric | Sample Value |
|---|---|
| Monthly Plays | 120,000 |
| Average Watch Time | 35.00 minutes |
| Average Bitrate | 3.80 Mbps |
| CDN Cache Hit Ratio | 90.00% |
| Stored Video Volume | 1,800.00 GB |
| Adaptive Renditions | 5 |
| Delivery Traffic | 116,894.53 GB |
| Total Monthly Cost | $6,993.59 |
| Cost Per Play | $0.0583 |
| Cost Per Viewer Hour | $0.0999 |
Formula Used
The calculator uses bitrate-driven traffic estimation, then layers processing, licensing, storage, observability, and redundancy to produce an operational monthly budget.
How to Use This Calculator
- Choose your reporting currency label.
- Enter monthly play count and average watch time.
- Add the average delivered bitrate for your stream ladder.
- Set cache hit ratio to estimate how much traffic still reaches origin.
- Provide CDN, origin, and storage pricing from your provider agreement.
- Enter ingest hours, rendition count, and transcoding or packaging rates.
- Add optional license, monitoring, and platform overhead values.
- Apply redundancy overhead if you run backup origins, multi-region storage, or failover delivery.
- Press the calculate button to view results, graphs, and export options.
FAQs
1. What does this calculator estimate?
It estimates monthly video streaming costs using delivery traffic, origin egress, storage, transcoding, packaging, DRM, monitoring, fixed platform charges, and redundancy overhead.
2. Why is bitrate so important?
Bitrate directly drives delivered data volume. Higher bitrate streams consume more bandwidth for the same viewing time, which usually increases CDN cost and sometimes origin cost too.
3. What is cache hit ratio?
Cache hit ratio measures how often viewers receive video segments from edge cache instead of origin. A higher ratio lowers origin bandwidth and reduces origin egress charges.
4. Should I use unique viewers or total plays?
Use total plays or playback sessions, not unique viewers. The calculator models delivery workload, and workload scales more closely with total sessions than audience headcount.
5. How do renditions affect cost?
More renditions increase adaptive streaming flexibility but also raise transcoding demand. Each added rendition multiplies processing hours and can meaningfully increase media preparation cost.
6. Does this include live and on-demand streaming?
Yes. It works for both when the inputs reflect your real workload. Live users can model event hours, while on-demand teams can focus on plays, watch time, and storage.
7. What is redundancy overhead?
Redundancy overhead covers resilience spending such as multi-region copies, backup origins, extra monitoring, reserved failover capacity, or duplicate control-plane services.
8. Can I export the results?
Yes. After calculation, use the CSV or PDF buttons to download a summary table of your calculated metrics for reporting, budgeting, or internal review.