Hosting your videos on your own site is not as expensive as you might think.
The cost of streaming your own content is made up of 3 parts:
1. Hosting account for your site - Hosting cost for the most part stays fixed, unless is a high traffic site.
When you see hosting priced at $3 a month, its meant for business website which don't have a lot of traffic.
And usually is an introductory price for the first few months. Than it goes up. The reason for the low price is
because business websites mostly consist of text and images and maybe low quality video or two, so it doesn't
use a lot of bandwidth.
2. Storage - Storage is where your videos are stored in a server somewhere and the cost of storage stays fixed.
3. Bandwidth - Think of bandwidth as a toll fee, to stream the video from the server to the subscriber. Videos, especially
4k content is a bandwidth hog. But is still affordable. And if no one watches your video, the bandwidth cost is zero for a
particular month. All you pay is the hosting fee.
- AWS is a popular storage and streaming server service that a lot of companies use. Last time I checked it cost 8 point 5
cents per gig plus storage which a separate cost. We only change 5 cents per gig for bandwidth. We include 500 gigs of
storage so you won't see a bill for storage from us until you go over that. But 500 gigs of storage is more than enough.
- The key to controlling the cost of bandwidth is to include it in the price of the content. So, when a subscriber watches the
content, its all taken care off.
- We have a bandwidth calculator on our site to help you price your content. I'll take you to that page now.
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So, as you can see we have: The resolution, bitrate which depending on the resolution is already set by default. so don't mess with it.
Than you have the frame rate, viewer count and the duration in hours and/or minutes.
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Let say you have a podcast. Lets leave the resolution at HD.
- Frame rate at 30.
- Viewer count set to one, because you want to know how much to charge each subscriber.
- And lets say is a one hour podcast.
- Click the calculate button.
- That the total cost of bandwidth per view.
- Now you have to include credit card fee. PayPal rate is about 3.9% plus 49 cent per transaction last time I checked.
- Say you price it at $3.00 a month.
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- $3 times 3.9% equals 12 cents.
- plus, 49 cents equals 61 cents for credit card processing.
- $3 minus 61 cents equal $2.39.
- minus 35 cents for HD content bandwidth cost equals $2.04 net profit. A 2 and halve hour, 2k full length feature film uses about 30 to 40 gigs of bandwidth. There is a free tool called handbrake that you can use to lower compression of 4k content so it won't use as much bandwidth and still delivering high resolution content.
- 1,000 subscribers equals $2,040 per month. 5,000 subscribers equals $10,400 per month. The most the ad platforms pay
per thousand is $50, if you are lucky.
- The best part for you is that you don't share it with us. Or sponsorship or merch for that matter.
- Just pay our hosting fee of $25 per month.
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- Now YouTube said that over halve watch their content on big screen tv's. It's why we want minimum 2K or 4K content. You need a lot pixels to fill the big screen tv's. Not to mention that they are paying for your content.
- 2k is 70 cents and 4k is $1.46 more for bandwidth cost than HD content. Just make your content at $3.70 or $4.49 for 4k. But even if you only make 25 cents net profit, at 50,000 subscriber equal to $12,500 per month.
- The sweet spot is between 3 to $5.00 per month. It's up to you.
- Just don't go crazy or no one will subscribe to your content.