People don’t realise how expensive video streaming is, especially at a larger service’s scale. There’s no just way to have a fully free service with no ads (or even just minimal ads).
Now, expect twitch to get a hefty discount. Even if they are paying 30% of that cost (and I’ve pulled that number out of my ass), that’s $500 per hour for a 10k viewer stream (and that’s assuming an average of 4mbps bitrate, not the source 8mbps).
A 10k (8mbps bitrate, so 80,000mbps or 80gbps total sending - egest? - bandwidth) viewer streamer is going to be on a 70/30 split.
So for a $5 sub, twitch is getting $1.50.
So that’s 330 subs per hour, or 5.5 subs per minute, or 1 sub every 11 seconds to cover the bandwidth costs.
AWS EC2 outbound bandwidth calculators align pretty closely with these costs, so it’s not like “video connections get the cheap networks” or anything.
People don’t realise how expensive video streaming is, especially at a larger service’s scale. There’s no just way to have a fully free service with no ads (or even just minimal ads).
It’s not even the servers or VOD storage. It’s the bandwidth.
Live streaming isn’t cheap. AWS have example pricing:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/solutions/latest/live-streaming-on-aws/cost.html
Now, expect twitch to get a hefty discount. Even if they are paying 30% of that cost (and I’ve pulled that number out of my ass), that’s $500 per hour for a 10k viewer stream (and that’s assuming an average of 4mbps bitrate, not the source 8mbps).
A 10k (8mbps bitrate, so 80,000mbps or 80gbps total sending - egest? - bandwidth) viewer streamer is going to be on a 70/30 split.
So for a $5 sub, twitch is getting $1.50.
So that’s 330 subs per hour, or 5.5 subs per minute, or 1 sub every 11 seconds to cover the bandwidth costs.
AWS EC2 outbound bandwidth calculators align pretty closely with these costs, so it’s not like “video connections get the cheap networks” or anything.