24-hour video stream help. GB & GB of bandwidth?

[dewie93]

Hi guys,

Looking to start a live stream of 2 cameras in 460 or 720p on a custom website which will watch arriving aircraft at an airport.

Expecting about 2k viewers a month and the stream will be live 24/7. 

Places like Ustream are looking at charging $500USD+ per month for something like this but why????

I don't understand how it all works. I have the cameras connected to a PC via a capture card and encoder. Why can't I simply link this into the site for nothing? Do I have to go through a 3rd party?

I ran a calculator on one of the sites with live time and expected visitors and it came out at 26,300GB a month. How on earth is that possible!?

I just don't understand any of this. Give me a screwdriver and some PC hardware and i'll build a PC in no time, but I haven't the foggiest about networking - Which is an inconvenience since I need to know how to set this new service up! 

[AMICLG]

It has to be streamed to 2000 people so that eats up bandwidth. 

 

You pay by bandwidth for dedicated lines/IP Transit from upstream providers. So the more bandwidth you use the more you pay simple as that.

 

This is why pretty much every website in existence host their videos on Youtube; it's free. Same goes for Podcast sites.

[RedWulf]

Not sure exactly where that data estimate comes from, my guess is total traffic and data being duplicated which isn't very accurate since all 2000 wont be watching 24/7 for a solid month. However, that is a fair amount of traffic. aside from that video streaming in that manner is mildly heavy considering its just shy of 1500 hours of video but many sites are over priced as well. You can just forward camera feed or just update the files every hour or so on your own site or server. I think some programs let you auto upload to youtube, just find a way to do that and add new video every hour or so.

[dewie93]

I think its the term bandwidth in this context i'm not understanding. If I'm uploading at say 1.8mbps for both, then that is it. Then each user is using their own internet to then download that live. Where am I wrong in this?

[Van Weapon]

First of all, I dont know what Airport youre doing this for but almost all if not all don't operate 24/7 so the stream is going to be very boring from about 11pm to 6am 

[Aytex]

1 minute ago, Van Weapon said:

First of all, I dont know what Airport youre doing this for but almost all if not all don't operate 24/7 so the stream is going to be very boring from about 11pm to 6am 

That depends on the type of airport

International airports like the one in atlanta is 24/7 busy af

 

(your in Australia nvm)

[Enderman]

do you really expect 2k people to watch a livestream of a plane taking off every 5 mins?

[dewie93]

The stream will be of the approach so you can see them from 10 miles out, then following the glidepath towards the runway, and then another camera to catch them in close view as they pass almost overhead the location. There is a camera overlooking an airport in the Caribbean which hits over 2k live watchers regularly during the day.

I have only posted on a couple of the relevant airport's 'spotter' facebook pages and amasked over 550 likes within a week, simply sharing it with my normal facebook profile once. There are over 7k members of the page that are interested in the airport, so I'd say it was likely.

This site hosts this live HD stream of a harbour where some of my relatives live. Got over 30,000 views in the first week it broadcast, but they don't charge or anything. Surely they won't be fronting nearly £500 a month to host it for barely any return other than maybe 1 or 2 renting a cottage at some point. Its no where near financial sense.

http://www.aspects-holidays.co.uk/st-ives-webcam

[squirrl]

13 minutes ago, dewie93 said:

I think its the term bandwidth in this context i'm not understanding. If I'm uploading at say 1.8mbps for both, then that is it. Then each user is using their own internet to then download that live. Where am I wrong in this?

You're uploading, but the server you're uploading to is constantly downloading that data. PLUS you're saying 2000 viewers, so it's counting that it's going to be uploading that data to about 2000 people at once, likely at the same rate. that's 1.8mb/s download AND 3600mb/s upload, constantly for a whole month that ustream or whatever is having to handle. Bandwidth isn't free.

[Van Weapon]

39 minutes ago, Aytex said:

That depends on the type of airport

International airports like the one in atlanta is 24/7 busy af

 

(your in Australia nvm)

I work at Sydney Airport, reason i mention is not because of busy-ness, but if an airport is located too closely to residential areas theyre prevented from having aircraft fly due to noise pollution. So I would assume that if this is a popular airport they would have at least a few hours of restrictions on flights which could leave you with some good downtime to save on data 

[dewie93]

Last flight is usually 1am, possible 2am if delays, restarting at 6am. I do understand that it would save a lot of time, but would be a simple task to switch off even if the camera and connected PC are remote from my location? I assume something like teamviewer would do the trick?

[AMICLG]

3 hours ago, dewie93 said:

I think its the term bandwidth in this context i'm not understanding. If I'm uploading at say 1.8mbps for both, then that is it. Then each user is using their own internet to then download that live. Where am I wrong in this?

You also have to pay for bandwidth of each user as well.

[brwainer]

The amount of data you are uploading to the internet is going to be small, as is the amount of data that each individual user will be downloading. However there isn't any good way (over the internet) to do multicasting (unicasting means I send this one stream to one user, broadcasting means I send this one stream out to everyone in the whole world/network, and multicasting means I send this one stream to the network and the network figures out how to deliver it to the specific users who want it). Over a single LAN you can fo multicasting, but you can't do that over the internet. Sure from the perspective of a user it might *appear* to be multicasting, but really what you and every other person streaming something on the internet is doing is unicasting your data to some server which then has to unicast the video out to every person watching at that time. So while you upload a little bit of data, the server has to upload massive amounts of data. And whomever is operating that server has to pay for the server's own access to the internet, as well as its power, cooling, and maintenance.

 

A decent quote for internet access in a well connected data center is about $0.50 (50 cents) USD per Mb/s - although bigger companies can get much better prices. So it you have 2000 viewers each being sent 1.8Mb/s for a total of 3600Mb/s, that's going to cost $1800 per month, just in internet access, before you factor in power, cooling, and maintenance. Now enterprise grade internet connections are normally charged at the 95th percentile, meaning they record the usage every 5 minutes, remove the top 5% of speeds recorded, and charge you for whatever the highest number remaining was. So the actual cost is going to be a bit hard to predict. But that gives you an idea of the pure internet cost if you were to set this up with your own streaming server. In my opinion, Ustream's quote of $500 per month is fair and reasonable. They clearly must get very good bandwidth prices due to their large size.