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Infrastructure calculator

Streaming Bandwidth & CDN Cost Calculator

Turn watch-hours and bitrate into monthly CDN egress, delivery cost, and peak throughput — so you can budget infrastructure before you scale.

Your inputs
Audience & usage
Sum of hours all viewers stream per month.
Used to estimate peak network throughput.
Video quality (bitrate)
CDN pricing
$
Your CDN egress rate (typically $0.02–$0.10 / GB at scale).

How it works

The calculation is straightforward bitrate math:

  • Data per hour = bitrate (Mbps) × 3,600 ÷ 8 ÷ 1,000 → GB per streamed hour
  • Monthly egress = total watch-hours × data per hour
  • CDN cost = monthly egress (GB) × your price per GB
  • Peak throughput = peak concurrent viewers × bitrate ÷ 1,000 → Gbps

Assumes 1 GB = 1,000 MB and a constant average bitrate. Real delivery varies with adaptive bitrate, device mix, and CDN overhead — treat this as a planning estimate. Want a multi-CDN, ABR-aware cost model for your catalog? Talk to our team.

FAQ

How much bandwidth does streaming use?
Data per hour = bitrate (Mbps) × 3,600 ÷ 8. A 6 Mbps 1080p stream uses about 2.7 GB per hour; 4K at 16 Mbps is roughly 7.2 GB per hour.
How do I estimate CDN cost?
Multiply total monthly egress (GB) by your CDN's price per GB. Egress is total watch-hours × per-hour data rate for your bitrate.
What CDN price per GB should I use?
Commodity egress is commonly $0.02–$0.10 per GB at scale; committed-volume and multi-CDN deals run lower. Use your contracted rate for accuracy.

Budget your streaming infrastructure

We'll model delivery cost across CDNs and devices for your real catalog — and show how Enveu keeps you in control of the stack.

These costs are driven by what you encode and how you deliver it. Experience Cloud handles transcoding, packaging and multi-CDN delivery to 15+ device platforms, while Enveu Flow automates the encoding and packaging pipeline behind it — so an efficient ladder is the default, not a project.

Talk to an OTT architect