Many filmmakers or small film production companies want to get their work online. Here's a bit of info based on some of Linking Arts' research for clients, and experience with filmmakers and festivals.

Streaming Commercial Video in 2010

State of the Industry (for at least the next 5 minutes)

There are plenty of players in the streaming space now. Content Delivery Network (CDN) is the buzzword of the day. Meaning, we sign up with a CDN provider, upload the files to them, and they use their own network of servers around the world to deliver locally hosted copies of our content quickly to the client (from the closest server).

The industry, predictably, has a few big fish (e.g. Akamai) and lots of little ones. Below that one might have another category (mollusks?), which includes Web hosts that provide streaming services (like Dreamhost or MediaTemple ). Streaming through your hosting account is generally for the small fry – relevant for the average jane who wants to stream a few clips, but not for anything beyond that. YMMV.

An additional wrinkle is that some of the following (e.g. Bandcon) are essentially brokers – companies that don’t use their own networks but mediate or manage the big CDN services, using their own technologies or services to provide tools for content producers to manage one or more CDNs.

Beyond that, you can set up your own CDN, but that’s not something to get into lightly. Let somebody else feel the pain.

The Companies Shortlist

Big Fish:

• Akamai
• CDNetworks
• Amazon Cloudfront
• Level 3
• Limelight Networks
• EdgeCast
• Internap

Little Fish:

• Bandcon
• Cachefly
• Cotendo
• GoGrid
• Imediasee
• Kaavo
• Livestream
• Mirror Image
• NaviSite
• Ustream/Watershed
• and dozens of others

Strategic Recommendations:

Start with the little guys who offer “pay as you go” pricing with easy setup, and move up to the big guys if/when you really start to move a lot of content and need more robust tools, custom this or that, etc . The smaller services are highly usable – you can get up and running in a matter of a few days, if not hours. Assuming you have your video prepared for streaming already.

When it comes time to negotiate for massive bandwidth, something to consider is that deals can be had if you commit to quarterly or yearly contracts, although longer than one year should be discouraged. This game changes too quickly to be locked into more than a year contract.

Brass Tacks

That said, here are some pricing guidelines based on monthly transfer in the first quarter of 2009, as quoted from Dan Rayburn’s CDNPricing – one would assume prices have dropped further in the last year, although probably not a huge amount:

• 50TB: High $0.52/GB, Low $0.45/GB
• 100TB: High $0.40/GB, Low $0.25/GB
• 250TB: High $0.20/GB, Low $0.10/GB
• 500TB: High $0.10/GB, Low $0.025/GB

Obviously these are for ginormous amounts of transfer.

To explain a bit further: a 3 minute video fully streamed 100 times is 300 minutes (5 hours) of streamed video. At a 300Kbps data-rate, a 3 minute video might be 7MB. That video fully streamed 100 times at that bit-rate is .7GB (700MB). So you’ve got a lot of headroom before you start racking up the streaming bills, even if we double or triple the numbers. You can fiddle with these calculations yourself with this tool (found via Google – no relationship with the site is implied):

http://www.videostreamingservices.com/Hosting_prices_calculator.htm

Costs like these represent a sea change from when we first started doing this – those were the days when the costs of having a successful video (or a morally bankrupt CEO of course) could bury your business (anyone remember DEN.net?).

Current Faves

Interestingly, Ustream’s Watershed bills by “Viewer Hours.” So on their “pay as you go” plan, you’re talking $50 for 500 hours viewed (that’s 10,000 3-minute streams, or 333 streams/day).

Ustream’s main competitor is Livestream (formerly Mogulus). They bill more traditionally. The lowest-level plan that is not ad-supported (“Premium”/whitelabel) is $350/mo, with 25GB transfer (and 25GB storage). That’s still not too bad. So to make a decision one would want to consider other services, such as payment processing systems, ease of use, support, etc.

Both of these offer very high quality video.

Postscript

Obviously this is not an in-depth “whitepaper” backed by thousands of dollars of corporate cash. In fact there’s no clear-cut “conclusion,” only a suggestion for a strategy that might work for a particular demographic. But if it’s of help to someone out there on the intarnets, great! Enjoy.

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