Until 5 years ago I was CTO of a company called Livestation where we handled live streaming of about 40 news broadcasters including Al Jazeera, BBC World, CNN International, etc.
In my stint we dealt with the Egyptian and Turkish uprisings. The relevant diasporas were super keen to see what was going on in all those countries, and often the only places you could see them online was with us (we had raw feeds in a few places).
There is no way we would have paid $752/hour for 20,000 users for 10 hours. We would have dropped the bit rate way, way down (which is fine for most content), and we'd agreed pretty decent bandwidth rates all round.
Depending on context, 2 second latency might not be worth it either - spend less, get 10 second latency and use HLS using an off the shelf CDN, and you're going to pull the price down even further. When Akamai can offer you a better deal than this, you have to wonder how good a deal this is. :-)
We did end up using RTMP a lot for a P2P live streaming product, but that never took off, and eventually the company folded. Fun times, though.
> When Akamai can offer you a better deal than this, you have to wonder how good a deal this is. :-)
If you were doing the volume of traffic necessary to get the Akamai discount in the range you are suggesting then you are also going to be able to negotiate Amazon pricing in a similar way. It is unfair to compare theoretical bulk CDN pricing to non-discounted Amazon pricing. It would be like negatively comparing the published price of some other CDN to your private knowledge of deals you did with Akamai that probably included contractual commitments.
If you go by published CDN pricing (I use Fastly as an example in another post below) and assume you are pushing close to the maximum bitrate then the comparison is actually reasonably fair. Anything outside of that is speculation based on theoretical deals you might negotiate based on theoretical usages.
However, I would have no problem agreeing that building your own system to handle large scale would probably get to a lower $/GB. But then you have to build it, maintain it, monitor it, etc.
My problem with Amazon at the time, was there was no mechanism to start that conversation. Most CDNs have account managers where you can have a call and discuss a TB/month commit, and price accordingly. I looked for ways to reach out to AWS to do the same, and no dice: they have the Hollywood principle in place, which means you'll get your account manager after you have already committed to them as a platform.
I'm sure that I would have got a better deal if only I'd figured out how...
In my stint we dealt with the Egyptian and Turkish uprisings. The relevant diasporas were super keen to see what was going on in all those countries, and often the only places you could see them online was with us (we had raw feeds in a few places).
There is no way we would have paid $752/hour for 20,000 users for 10 hours. We would have dropped the bit rate way, way down (which is fine for most content), and we'd agreed pretty decent bandwidth rates all round.
Depending on context, 2 second latency might not be worth it either - spend less, get 10 second latency and use HLS using an off the shelf CDN, and you're going to pull the price down even further. When Akamai can offer you a better deal than this, you have to wonder how good a deal this is. :-)
We did end up using RTMP a lot for a P2P live streaming product, but that never took off, and eventually the company folded. Fun times, though.