We all love Amazon, don’t we? Did you know that in addition to being one of the largest e-commerce sites, Amazon is also one of the best players in the cloud computing? There are many advantages of using Amazon services. It is scalable, stable, well documented and flexible. But the price of Amazon services really depends on the amount of traffic that is going in and out of the virtual servers.

Lets review what is current pricing structure is and what it will cost from network data perspective to provide video streaming through Amazon.

Network billing is done for both incoming and outgoing data. Lets use reasonable minimum estimates of 1.5 hours of live video broadcasting from a church every Sunday, at 256Kbit/sec combined video and audio bitrate. This translates into 256/8*60*60*1.5=172MB of transferred data to publish a video stream. This is considered an incoming data, that is currently priced at $0.10 per GB. So incoming data cost is 0.172*0.1 is about 2 cents!!!

Outgoing data not only depends on video quality, but also on number of viewers that watch the broadcast. Lets assume this broadcast is being watched by 40 people, then the total price of outgoing traffic will be (172MB*40/1000-1GB)*$0.15=5.88*$0.15=$0.88. Amazon provides 1GB of free traffic and this is accounted for in the calculation.

Total broadcast cost of 1.5 hour video streaming at 256Kbit/s bitrate to 40 viewers through Amazon is about $0.9

Monthly cost will be about $4.5

If you stream to 100 viewers at the same 256Kbit/s bitrate – networking cost will be around $11 a month.

Increasing bitrate to 512Kbit/s will essentially double the networking bill to about $22 a month.

If you are broadcasting church services for more than 1.5 hours a week such as twice every Sunday or total of 3 hours a week, this will double the bill again to about $44 a month.

We encourage you to compare EC2 services cost to “Church Video Streaming” offerings and make a decision.

This article should not be used as a primary calculation of Amazon computing cost, but it was intended to understand Amazon’s network pricing in regards to video streaming. There are additional costs associated with Amazon’s EC2 service, such as instance cost and storage cots, that are not described here.

Additional information about Amazon’s EC2 service and pricing can be found here:

EC2 Pricing - http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

Calculator – http://aws.amazon.com/calculator