Disclaimer: I used to work at a live video streaming company as a financial analyst so quite familiar with this
The biggest cost is as you imagine the streaming - getting the video to the viewer. It was a large part of our variable cost and we had a (literal) mad genius dev ops person holed up in his own office cave that managed the whole operation.
Ive long forgotten the special optimizations he did but he would keep finding ways to improve margin / efficiency.
Encoding is a cost but I don’t recall it being significant
Storage isnt generally expensive. Think about how cheap you as a consumer can go get 2 TB of storage, and extrapolate.
The other big expense - people! All those engineers to build back and front end systems. That’s what ruined us - too many people were needed and not enough money coming in so we were burning cash.
The biggest cost is as you imagine the streaming - getting the video to the viewer. It was a large part of our variable cost and we had a (literal) mad genius dev ops person holed up in his own office cave that managed the whole operation.
Ive long forgotten the special optimizations he did but he would keep finding ways to improve margin / efficiency.
Encoding is a cost but I don’t recall it being significant
Storage isnt generally expensive. Think about how cheap you as a consumer can go get 2 TB of storage, and extrapolate.
The other big expense - people! All those engineers to build back and front end systems. That’s what ruined us - too many people were needed and not enough money coming in so we were burning cash.