Where is the actual data for these articles? Does anyone have a link to the actual figures Credit Suisse put together, with explanations as to where the figures came from?
OK, here goes some back-of-the envelope math (risky business in this group, so looking forward to hearing what I'm doing wrong..). Where I have made assumptions, I have erred on the side of 'expensive', i.e. this should be an upper bound estimate:
75,000,000,000 streams/year
400 kbps (average bw)
average stream length: 300 s (stream length, not video length, highball estimate)
-> BW/year = 1.13e9 GB/year
0.1 $/GB (BW cost, based on AWS S3 prices, again a highball)
-> BW cost ~= $113m / year
Only 1/3 of the estimated amount, and I'm not taking account of any clever stuff YT do to lower the costs. What gives? Is this a peak BW issue?
"To arrive at the estimated $360 million bandwidth tab for YouTube, the analysts assumed the site will receive 375 million unique visitors in 2009 and that a maximum of 20% of those users are on the site at any given time."
There's no way 20% of visitors are streaming video simultaneously. I doubt it's even 1%. Kongregate maxes out at about 0.5% of its monthly uniques connected to chat at once.
