BroadbandReports.com: 25 Cents to Stream a DVD Quality Film - 80 Cents for HD, a nickel for iPod TV…
From BroadbandReports.com: 25 Cents to Stream a DVD Quality Film - 80 Cents for HD, a nickel for iPod TV…:
Dave Burstein crunches the numbers behind offering video via broadband and concludes that it costs a quarter to stream a DVD quality movie, 80 cents for an HD film, or a nickel for iPod or AOL TV shows. A much more reasonable analysis than the recent UK report that claimed it cost ISPs $39 to stream a two hour HD film. This compared to broadcast over the air video, which costs a few pennies per hour to distribute.
“For providing managed servers and internet bandwidth, several content delivery networks are bidding $10,000 to $12,000 per continuous gigabit per month. That’s enough for 700 1.5 megabit streams, almost DVD quality if pre-encoded in the latest MPEG-4, Flash, or Windows Media. Amazon’s choice of 2.5 megabit encoding may be raising the bar. It’s also enough for over 3,000 300 Kbps streams, appropriate for iPods or the quarter screen video AOL and ABC are distributing supported by ads.”
Burstein also comments on how players like Apple and Amazon will threaten TelcoTV’s already fragile projected profit margins.