Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Using Cloudflare is one option - sample pricing[0]:

Streaming a library of 500 GB of HD videos over the course of one month with approximately 72,000 minutes of viewing time to a global market.

Total cost: $78.00/month

[0] https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream



Cloudflare seems fairly expensive for on-demand (that is, uploaded ahead of time) video. They list their prices as $1/1000min delivered plus $5/1000min/month stored. I presume transcoding is included in those rates (since I don’t find any other line item).

Translate Bunny’s pricing <https://bunny.net/stream/> to these numbers: $1/200GB delivered (assuming the volume network—the standard network is 2–12× the price, but I would not expect it to be justified) plus $5/500GB/month stored, and transcoding is included in those rates.

Bunny is cheaper to deliver below 26⅔ Mbps, and cheaper to store where the sum of all transcoded forms is below 66⅔ Mbps. This will almost always be cheaper, normally much cheaper. It depends on the content, but your 1080p60 video is almost always under 10Mbps, probably under 5Mbps, not uncommonly well under 2Mbps. Your bill with Bunny will probably be less than a third of your bill with Cloudflare, and for typically more static sorts of content (e.g. programming tutorials), probably less than a tenth.

(I am presuming the products are roughly equivalent. This may or may not be true. I have used neither.)

I should also mention that Cloudflare’s sample pricing uses grossly unrealistic rates: they translate “500 GB of HD videos” into “1,200 minutes of video content”, which means 55 5⁄9 Mbps. “HD” tends to mean 1080p these days, though it does still get used for 720p too. (Some label 1440p and 2160p/4K as HD too, but I’d say they’re beyond it.) I accuse Cloudflare of using a rate that’s around four times too high. They don’t go into detail on their “typical public cloud provider” costs so I don’t know how realistic the rest is, but given how they’ve started with something that makes them look implausibly cheap, I’m not impressed.


I guess their competition is AWS and the public cloud alikes, and pricing is good enough to compete

But yeah, "marketing driven" price


> they translate “500 GB of HD videos” into “1,200 minutes of video content”

Where does it say this? I can't find it.


https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream/

> Streaming a library of 500 GB of HD videos over the course of one month with approximately 72,000 minutes of viewing time to a global market.

> Storage: $6.00 - Storage costs are based on 1,200 minutes of video content at $5 per 1,000 minutes stored.


Ah! I see.

Could this be because they pre-transcode to different bitrates, and have to store each version?


I considered that possibility, but decided the wording is fairly clearly referring to pre-transcoding library size (“500 GB of HD videos”).

On reflection, it’s possible that there was a miscommunication that led to this wording, since if it were the post-transcoding figure it wouldn’t be outlandish for something like VP9/H.264/AV1 at 1080p/720p/480p/360p, though it’d still be on the high side.


Yeah, that's what I'm wondering. They might also just be being conservative with the number of minutes, in case people upload massive bitrate videos.

Genuine question - what would they gain by making the storage low for the amount of video? I can't figure it out.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: