What the same audience costs at list price.
Viewcast delivers live video to large audiences: one copy of the programme crosses the long-distance network and fans out only where the audience is, so the delivery bill stops climbing with the audience. Put in your peak audience and see what a month costs at the public list prices of the large clouds, next to ours.
A month of delivery, side by side
1,0001,000,000
US dollars per gigabyte, what you actually pay. Worked out in your browser; nothing is sent or stored.
Fine-tune: average audience, bitrate, hours, region
5%100%
1 Mbps20 Mbps
1 h24 h
Each provider prices its own region of that name; one without a published rate for it says so.
- Traffic per month 6,034,970 GB at 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes (Amazon, Google) · 6,480,000 GB at 1 GB = 10⁹ bytes (Azure Front Door, Fastly)
One month of delivery to the same audience
- At your rate
- Amazon CloudFront$161,424
United States · list price
- Google Cloud CDN$135,035
North America (including Hawaii) · list price
-
Viewcast
Launch · delivery, with the traffic included · no overage
You pay for the audience you hold, not for every gigabyte. A spike costs nothing extra. See the whole price list
Add a channel: per channel, playout on top of delivery. Modules and bundle discounts are on the pricing page.
- Azure Front Door$9,170
Zone 1 - North America · list price
- Fastly$1,988
North America · list price
Azure Front Door and Fastly publish no price above 150 TB and 20 TB a month; above that it is contact sales.
Customers typically save 30% or more on what they currently pay their delivery network.
Below about 10,000 peak concurrent viewers we take on a channel only when there is real content, a growth plan and the budget behind it.
These are list prices. Most broadcasters pay less than list; put your rate in the box to compare with your own bill.
This is for delivery to your own viewers (OTT, FAST, IPTV). A feed to a distributor or broadcaster (SRT, HLS pull, RTMP push) is a managed connection at a fixed $250 a month, not priced on viewers. See the price list.
Traffic per month (bytes) = peak × share × bitrate (bit/s) ÷ 8 × hours × 3,600 × 30 = 10,000 × 40% × 5,000,000 ÷ 8 × 24 × 3,600 × 30 = 6,480,000,000,000,000 bytes, which is 6,034,970 GB (1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes), or 5,893.5 TB; at 1 GB = 10⁹ bytes it is 6,480,000 GB.
About these figures
If you already know your rate per gigabyte, put it in the box above and the comparison becomes yours. If you do not, we will work it out with you.
Public list prices for egress (data transfer out) for North America, as published on 28 October 2026 (sources below). Tiered rates applied per month. Above a few hundred terabytes a month, nobody buys at list price: you negotiate, and the gap between list and what you pay is an order of magnitude, not a rounding error.
Providers whose published table stops before the month’s volume get no bar and are left out of the average, because the rest has no public price and is not guessed.
Delivery is billed on the 95th percentile of concurrent viewers, so a genuine spike costs nothing; what is paid for is the level actually held.
Every bar is egress only, the same basis for all. Left out of the bars: request fees, cache fill, edge-to-origin transfer and base fees. Azure Front Door also charges a base fee of $35 (Standard) or $330 (Premium) a month, and Amazon has a separate free first terabyte a month that is not deducted here.
How the list price is applied
Each provider bills egress in tiers that reset every calendar month: the first block of traffic is charged at the first rate, the next block at the next rate, and so on. The calculator walks the published table in order and charges each block at its own rate. Amazon and Google state their tiers in gibibytes (1 GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes), which is why their first tier reads 10,240 GB rather than 10,000. Azure Front Door and Fastly do not state the unit, so a GB is taken as 109 bytes.
| Tier | Rate | Billed at this rate | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 – 10,240 GB | $0.085 per GB | 10,240 GB | $870 |
| 10,240 – 51,200 GB | $0.08 per GB | 40,960 GB | $3,277 |
| 51,200 – 153,600 GB | $0.06 per GB | 102,400 GB | $6,144 |
| 153,600 – 512,000 GB | $0.04 per GB | 358,400 GB | $14,336 |
| 512,000 – 1,048,576 GB | $0.03 per GB | 536,576 GB | $16,097 |
| 1,048,576 – 5,242,880 GB | $0.025 per GB | 4,194,304 GB | $104,858 |
| over 5,242,880 GB | $0.02 per GB | 792,090 GB | $15,842 |
| Total $161,424 | |||
| Tier | Rate | Billed at this rate | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 – 10,240 GB | $0.08 per GB | 10,240 GB | $819 |
| 10,240 – 153,600 GB | $0.055 per GB | 143,360 GB | $7,885 |
| 153,600 – 1,024,000 GB | $0.03 per GB | 870,400 GB | $26,112 |
| over 1,024,000 GB | $0.02 per GB | 5,010,970 GB | $100,219 |
| Total $135,035 | |||
| Tier | Rate | Billed at this rate | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 – 10,000 GB | $0.083 per GB | 10,000 GB | $830 |
| 10,000 – 50,000 GB | $0.066 per GB | 40,000 GB | $2,640 |
| 50,000 – 150,000 GB | $0.057 per GB | 100,000 GB | $5,700 |
| Total $9,170 for the first 150 TB; above that: contact sales | |||
| Tier | Rate | Billed at this rate | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 – 100 GB | $0 per GB | 100 GB | $0 |
| 100 – 10,000 GB | $0.12 per GB | 9,900 GB | $1,188 |
| 10,000 – 20,000 GB | $0.08 per GB | 10,000 GB | $800 |
| Total $1,988 for the first 20 TB; above that: contact sales | |||
Sources
- Amazon CloudFront, data transfer out to internet, on demand. Read from the AWS Price List API, offer AmazonCloudFront; the offer file carries publication date 19 October 2026, 15:05:00 UTC. pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonCloudFront/current/index.json
- Google Cloud CDN, cache data transfer out, per GiB. Read from the published pricing page on 28 October 2026, which carries no publication date of its own. cloud.google.com/cdn/pricing
- Azure Front Door (Standard and Premium), outbound data transfer from edge to client. Read from the published pricing page on 28 October 2026, which carries no publication date of its own; the published table stops at 150 TB a month and above that Microsoft says to contact them. Unit not stated by the provider; GB taken as 109 bytes. azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/frontdoor/
- Fastly, Full Site Delivery bandwidth, billed per GB per region per month with the first 100 GB free. Read from the published pricing page on 28 October 2026, which carries no publication date of its own; the published table stops at 20 TB a month and above that Fastly says to contact them. Unit not stated by the provider; GB taken as 109 bytes. fastly.com/pricing
- Azure CDN from Microsoft (classic) is not compared. Microsoft’s pricing page says: “As of October 1, 2025, no new instances will be created. On September 30, 2027, it will be retired. Moving forward, we suggest using Azure Front Door.” A prospect can no longer buy it. azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cdn/
- Google Cloud CDN publishes no separate rate for India or Africa; India is priced as Asia Pacific and Africa as “All other destinations”.
Every figure above is a published list price, not what any named customer pays, and not a Viewcast price.
Where we start, and what it saves
We work with broadcasters and platforms from about 10,000 peak concurrent viewers. Below that, the saving rarely covers the effort of switching.
Customers typically save 30% or more on what they currently pay their delivery network, and the saving grows as the audience grows. We price against what the equivalent unicast delivery would cost you, so the bigger your peaks, the wider the gap.
Notes
- The figures above are list prices. Most broadcasters pay less than list, so the ceiling is not the bill.
- Savings are stated against the equivalent unicast delivery cost and vary with audience peaks.
- It is the delivery leg that changes, not your stack: SmartCast plugs in as a transparent carve-out behind your existing playout and DRM, typically live in four to six weeks.
What does a 24/7 live channel to 10,000 concurrent viewers cost a month?
Delivering a live channel that holds 10,000 concurrent viewers around the clock is the Launch tier on Viewcast: $12,000 a month at list price, with the traffic included and no overage.
Delivery is billed on the 95th percentile of concurrent viewers, so a genuine spike costs nothing; what is paid for is the level actually held. The peak decides whether it is worth talking; the 95th percentile decides what is paid.
- Is the traffic included, or billed per gigabyte on top?
- Traffic is included and there is no overage. You buy sustained audience, not a pile of gigabytes: we measure concurrent viewers every five minutes and drop the highest five per cent of those samples.
- What if our 10,000 is a peak, not a level?
- Two channels can share a peak of 10,000 and be nothing alike. One holds it around the clock; the other sits at 2,500 and touches 10,000 on a good night. The first pays Launch. The second has a 95th percentile near 2,500, so it pays for 2,500 and its spike is free. Below Launch we quote per thousand, from $1,200 per 1,000 sustained viewers with a minimum of $4,000 a month.
- Is playout of the channel in that price?
- No. Playout is listed per channel, from $2,250 a channel per month for one to nine channels, and playout, delivery and the modules together are 20 per cent off on a twelve-month term, 25 per cent on twenty-four. You can also take just the delivery layer: we plug in as a transparent carve-out behind your existing playout and DRM.
Notes
- All figures are list prices in US dollars per month, excluding VAT. A quote is set against your own bill and peak.
- The calculator above prices the same audience at public CDN list prices. Your negotiated rate is lower; this is the ceiling, not your bill.
Five contracts, or one.
Playout, server-side ad insertion, DRM, analytics and the delivery layer itself: one integrated stack, one contract, one portal.
What you buy separately today · what SmartPlay covers
- Playout
- SmartPlay playout.
- Ad insertion
- Server-side ad insertion against VAST 3.0 and 4.0.
- Protection
- Widevine DRM with bring-your-own-key for video on demand.
- Measurement
- Join and leave events from the infrastructure itself.
- Monitoring
- A 24/7 network operations centre.
- Delivery
- SmartCast.
Pricing is quoted against your current bill and your peak concurrency.
The numbers come from the infrastructure
DanceTV, an independent company and a customer of eight years, runs nine channels around the clock to more than 140 countries on SmartCast, per internal analytics.
Every endnode reports join and leave events over a TLS backchannel, so viewer counts, session durations and geography come from the infrastructure itself, not from browser cookies, tracking pixels or third-party scripts.
Uptime, reach and viewing figures are per internal analytics; the telemetry record is continuous since 2019 and is opened for diligence on request.