Youtube bandwidth?
Today's Globe and Mail had an article on Youtube today. What always strikes me when people talk about Youtube is the cost of bandwidth. People seem to make a big deal about what they're spending, and hey, $2mm per month is nothing to sneeze at.
At 3 billion videos per month, that's $.67 in bandwidth cost per 1000 views. I've got no idea, but I suspect that's miles cheaper than what a conventional television station might pay for 1000 viewers. Different viewers, different experience, different monetization, and bandwidth isn't your only infrastructure cost, but still... Ask yourself, if you spent $.67 to get 1000 people to watch your television station, don't you think you could make money?
In constructing a financial model for our startup, I was amazed, even with purely rented servers, what a small component bandwidth and hosting was in overall projected costs. We're even looking at Amazon's cloud computing offering as an additional option to trend our infrastructure costs toward zero.
Whether Youtube can maintain its brand and solve its seemingly large issues with copyright is another story, but spending $2mm per month on bandwidth strikes me as a bargain. And that cost per 1000 viewers is only going to go down.
