How to best project cost of storing and streaming videos?

Cost of streaming video is just so subjective of how much time a particular video gets seen by individuals, because that would impact I/O cost.

Whats the best way to project costs in this scenario?

Are there any case studies available on usage of video media from big online video services like Vimeo, youtube, blip etc.

Our company (Pixability ) has built a SaaS for video marketing and also has a video production arm. We deal with tons of raw, encoded, edit-by-proxy video. One thing we have learned early on is there are SO MANY variables, it is hard to find the right data in general. You have to decide on exact format, exact audience, exact type or streaming, etc. etc. and then you can get your answer.

That all said, we are staying the heck away from building our own CDN, streaming platforms, etc. Youtube, Brightcove, and Wistia are our partners and we leave that part of the headache to them. And trust me, they will not share their data.

Jeff, actual live streaming can get very expensive. Most services are not actual streaming, but pseudo streaming which essentially gives you a similar result.

Micorosft IIS has made streaming a lot simpler but still lack support of Flash player. At the end it would all depend on your bandwidth and server loads, which are reflected by your hosting agreements and the popularity of your content.

The good news is hosting gets cheaper all the time.

If you wana do some case studies then the better way is this that you visit some outsourcing project forums. At there, so many projects examples with new advancements are available.