The bandwidth costs are the key. Good luck getting rates anywhere near what Google’s effectively are. Spoiler: you can’t. You probably can’t realistically get to 5x their costs, byte-for-byte.
Which makes competing with them effectively impossible except for a very-few other megacorps.
Bandwidth costs are actually free, so this isn't exactly accurate.
Most bandwidth is via settlement-free peering with thousands of ISPs around the world. At least that's how we did it at Twitch, and how we did it when I worked at a large CDN before that. There are still costs for backhaul, interconnect, colocation space, dark fiber, network hardware, and transit to fill the gaps. But this talk about how "Google can magically do it 5x cheaper" is nonsense.
I think vundercind was implicitly including Twitch in the phrase "except for a very-few other megacorps".
If you're wondering, if you can't get peering, you wind up like Twitch. In South Korea. South Korean telecom law explicitly shifts the capital expenditure costs of ISPs over to other online services, which is sort of like the fucked-up opposite of Net Neutrality regulation. So Twitch was being bled dry to pay for the chaebols' network expansion. Hell, even after Twitch left, South Korea fined them for leaving!
> In the wake of them ceasing service, Twitch has been fined for 435 million Korean won – but not for the entire service being terminated. This is related only to them making it so users in South Korea can’t access VODs on the platform, something seen as a direct violation of South Korea’s telecom laws by Korea’s Telecommunications Commission (KCC).
> According to Yonhap, the KCC made the decision that Twitch terminating the ability for users in South Korea to access VODs wasn’t necessary to keep the service alive. When asked to justify their claims, Twitch declined due to contractual obligations related to keeping user and site data private.
> Additionally, Twitch would have to present evidence that their decision to gradually take features away from South Korean users & leave the country was necessary. This means that Twitch isn’t likely to return service to South Korea any time soon.
> There’s also a good chance Twitch will be forced to provide refunds for those who have been affected by the service being discontinued, with the KCC warning Twitch that they need to prepare “user protection measures” as they cease service in the country.
> There are still costs for backhaul, interconnect, colocation space, dark fiber, network hardware, and transit to fill the gaps.
Genuine question - aren't those gaps essentially what make a video streaming service operate at scale though? It'd be like saying "ya this bus can get everyone from NYC to Philly at $10 but doesn't stop anywhere in between", or am I missing something about all of those gap filling components?
That isn't free. For every terabit of bandwidth, you have to physically build out a terabit of network. Not even remotely free. Having already built the network, and being already paying to run it, you can then use it for free, yes.
This is the model for all networks, indeed, most businesses - they pay a big upfront and moderate recurring cost to make a fast network (or restaurant or widget factory) and then sell it in slices with a large freedom to choose a pricing model. Pay per terabyte is a pretty reasonable way to pass on the network's fixed cost to consumers, just like part of the cost of the restaurant meal covers the interior decorations, even though the decorations don't actually cost more the more people eat, until the restaurant gets so busy it needs to expand.
I didn't say it's free of cost. My point is that a terabit of bandwidth delivered to consumers in a particular geographical area doesn't require a terabit of bandwidth from the center to that area, because much of the content can be cached.
So the 'terabit of network' the content provider needs to build need only span a few hundred feet within a single building.
I never said it did. You still have to build whatever you want. A terabit of edge network is a terabit of edge network that has to be physically built.
Not all networks are the same. Some have terabit backbones and gigabit edges, some have the reverse. We'd still call both of them, roughly, terabits of network, and you still have to build them. The one with the terabit core might actually be easier because you have less of the expensive really fast equipment.
In some ways it's less scary: no long inter-site fiber runs that I assume are an absolute nightmare, and no renting those same runs at exorbitant rates. All your hands-on work remains in the datacenter, which is set up to make it a breeze. In other ways it's more scary: you have to negotiate with a lot more counterparties and visit a lot more datacenters.
Typically the problem is that Comcast won't peer with you. They always use the excuse that they only peer with equals, and since they aren't sending you as much traffic as you're sending them, it's not in line with their peering policy. This, of course, is a problem of their own creation; they're cable so customers all have a tiny amount of upload bandwidth and a large amount of download bandwidth. It is unlikely their policy permits peering with anyone. The ultimate effect is that you have to buy transit from a Tier 1 ISP instead of with the consumer ISP directly, costing you money. There are, of course, backroom deals where they sell a subscription tier that doesn't include video and then they throttle all the video. That's different than the peering issues; there is enough capacity to send all of your packets to them, they just throttle them on their end to squeeze money out of their customers.
I've worked at 2 ISPs and we obviously didn't have this peering policy, because it's dumb and it breaks the Internet. We also didn't throttle video, because it's dumb and breaks the Internet.
Could anyone help me understand what this means in practice, at scale? I keep doing the math and getting numbers either way to small or way too big. If each users streams 200MB over a 10 minute session, and they arrive on the site uniformly distributed over time (false premises, I know), how much would 1,000,000 sessions a month cost? I get confused by terabits and terabytes and how "per second" bandwidth metering actually works. I keep getting to the conclusion that for $1,000,000 you could handle 16,200,000,000 sessions per month, which is more traffic than phub gets and less money than I assume they spend.
Assuming 10 Mbit/s per stream that would serve 1 million concurrent streams 24/7. If we assume people watch 2.4 hours per day on average, it could support 10 million active users. Or a cost to serve for bandwidth alone of 1 USD/user per year.
I am so confused here. Either I’ve been doing high-bandwidth bit slinging extremely wrong for quite a while or a lot of HN has never done it at all and is opining on it anyway. It’s real money, IME.
Price business pipes where they won’t cut you off for saturating that 24/7.
[edit] and that have good deliverability worldwide, no weird paths to other consumer IPs that intermittently fail to route or inexplicably have dial-up transfer speeds. And have anything like a real SLA.
I don't think they legally can in number of European jurisdictions. This isn't like Comcast overselling their copper cables - brand new fiber paid for by the EU comes with certain obligations.
Cloud bandwidth pricing has nothing with do with costs and everything to do with lock in .
You can get 100x cheaper and unmetered at a low cost provider like OVH or hetzner or similar bare metal data centers .
It doesn’t even need significant monthly commits to get that pricing if you are running video streaming at scale you are not running on AWS or even tier 2 like OVH for sure
* if our upstream is saturated we're going to look at our biggest users and if the number is really big we'll send them a polite email to please reduce it or pay more.
There are reports of people getting emails from Hetzner after sending multiple Gbps continuously for several months. That's the level you have to reach before the * kicks in. Only 1Gbps servers are unmetered, so you'd have to have several.
If you want to know a better approximation of their true cost just look at their non-unlimited plans: 20TB/month included for free; 1€/TB (excl VAT) after that.
I have one more interesting data point to add: I was quoted 950€/month for a dedicated 10Gbps between Berlin and Amsterdam (about 600km) plus peering at AMS-IX, or 300€ for 1Gbps. (They're not secretive and you can just ask for a quote using their sales contact form). Extrapolating, it seems that 1€ is worth about 2.5 petabyte-kilometers, at least within the dense interconnections of continental Europe. About twice the price of shipping a petabyte of hard drives the same distance.
> If you want to know a better approximation of their true cost just look at their non-unlimited plans: 20TB/month included for free; 1€/TB (excl VAT) after that.
I will point out that this is still about 50x-80x cheaper than Amazon. Not far off the claim of 100x.
Cloudflare and most other Object Storage Providers either fully free egress for all users or at-least for inter-cloud transit so you can then put a free/cheap CDN like Cloudflare in front and not pay all that much for b/w.
AWS refuses to participate. Costs of retrieval of all data plus associated bandwidth is a so high for many people that they stick to S3 including me.
But anyone doing things at great scale, isn’t going with OVH. You could use it as an origin I goes but you’d still need CDN for decent content delivery.
Note: that was for a dedicated 10-gigabit link from specific location A to specific location B, plus a peering at one large IX, without any access to the rest of the internet.
Nonetheless it does give a ballpark for the cost of bandwidth being a lot lower than people think. A 10G internet connection would be cheaper to provide in some parts of that equation and more expensive in others - should end up in the same ballpark.
It was more than 5 years ago and was not a direct commitment. Another company was being used for their data centers, and this was a lease/rental agreement of equipment; Think colocation model, but where you're like 50-80% of being the main client of the data centers.
Add 10-25% profit for that company to get closer to true "raw transit" pricing from the carriers directly.
And telegeography just sells information, but they had a blog post that's now three years out of date reporting that "In Q2 2021, the lowest 10 GigE prices on offer were at the brink of $0.09 per Mbps per month. The lowest for 100 GigE were $0.06 per Mbps per month."
You need to factor in that your utilization won't be 100%, but if you're comparing 6 cents for a Mbps and and 5 cents for a gigabyte, then the exact point where AWS is 100x more expensive is when your line is 36% utilized.
Yes, at certain scale you likely have deals with many CDNs.
At even higher scale (YouTube, Facebook or even Netflix ) you are going to be putting content caching servers at the local ISP PoPs : it is mutually beneficial to do so .
So you can piggy back on the CDNs that do the same until you can afford to do so, with the same performance. This isn’t a privilege only given to those cloud providers, anyone with a checkbook and a pulse can do it.
The key point is video streaming products are not impaired because of high cost of bandwidth, that only YouTube can only afford because Google subsidizes it from other revenue. YouTube is profitable by itself, the combination of premium and ads is more than enough to pay for it.
It is hard to directly compete on long-form video because of audience and content depth advantage Google has with YouTube.
There are successful niche players who are fairly large (like Vimeo or Twitch or even OnlyFans) who focus on specific markets that don't require social network advantage like corporate or smaller segments etc.
For general purpose media, creators are going to focus on the platform with most audience and vice-versa, very hard to break that.
Agreed, I guess my point in my original comment is; yes, bandwidth is cheap but you aren’t going to compete at any scale hosting at OVH as was proposed. And you’ll need a lot more than cheap VMs too.
It was not that OVH is competitive for streaming , it is that even likes of OVH is orders of magnitude cheaper than cloud, let alone actual setups for streaming companies whose cost data no one in this thread has access to.
To be fair, that is the penalty of being in a shared cloud. They are incetivized to keep their customers from using everything, everywhere, all at once.
Jump into a 'bare metal' datacenter and things can get much different.
Which makes competing with them effectively impossible except for a very-few other megacorps.