YouTube, On2, and the Economics of Ultra HD: Tallying the Costs
The nice thing about cloud encoding is that it comes with an assigned a fixed cost. Combine that knowledge with a spreadsheet, and you can go in all sorts of interesting directions. Like how much it costs to convert your content to VP9/HEVC and how many views you need to recoup that cost. Just for fun, we can apply these numbers to YouTube and VP9 and see exactly why Google bought On2.
Of course, we have to make some assumptions, as dangerous as that can be. 让我们先看看成本方面. None of the cloud houses that produce HEVC would share their pricing, other than noting that it was more expensive than H.264, which make sense since it’s at least twice as CPU-intensive, as is VP9. 但如今，亚马逊的收费为0美元.015 per minute for SD encoding and twice that for HD ($0.03). 再加0美元.015 for HEVC or VP9 and assume a blended rate of $0.VP9或HEVC每分钟0.45. For convenience, let’s work in hour chunks and assume that all adaptive groups have nine streams. This gives us a cost per hour of $24.VP9或HEVC为30.
现在让我们看看储蓄方面. YouTube has been deploying VP9 since September 2013. 如果你下载1080p的H.264 and compare them to 1080p VP9 streams, VP9 is about 43 percent more efficient, while 720p streams are about 35 percent more efficient. 很明显, that will drop for lower resolution streams, so let’s assume that both VP9 and HEVC will deliver, 平均, 节省25%的带宽. Translating this to bitrates, let’s assume that 1 hour of H.264 video consumes 1GB, for a per second data rate of 2.083 mbps. With a 25 percent savings, the VP9/HEVC file would take 0.75GB，数据速率为1.562 mbps. 听起来合理?
Amazon Cloudfront’s fourth tier of pricing is $0.04/GB. 在这个价格下，H.264小时的视频将花费0美元.04交付，VP9/HEVC $0.为节省0美元.每小时观看01美元. 所以它花了你24美元.30 to encode the streams, which you recoup at $0.每视图01. 除24美元.30 by $0.01 and you get 2,430 hours of viewing to recoup the encoding cost.
将此逻辑应用于 YouTube 是具有挑战性的. We can guestimate the savings side but not the cost. Specifically, according to YouTube’s website, the site currently streams 6 billion hours per month. 根据我的联系人, YouTube is delivering 30 percent of all content using VP9, which means the company is saving 25 percent of delivery cost on 1.每月80亿小时，也就是21小时.每年60亿小时的视频. Amazon’s cheapest bandwidth cost is $0.02/GB; let’s assume YouTube is paying half that, or $0.01/GB. The same 25 percent bandwidth saving means YouTube is saving $54 million per year by using VP9.
What we can’t easily estimate is how much YouTube is spending on encoding those videos. 根据我的联系人 at YouTube, the company doesn’t encode all content to VP9, 就是“最受欢迎的内容”.” According to old numbers, only 0.33 percent of YouTube Videos achieve more than 1 million views, so 1 percent would be a good chunk of the most popular videos. YouTube receives 100 hours of video every minute; if we assumed that YouTube’s encoding cost is 50 percent of what we used above, or $0.0225, and nine streams of VP9 for every input stream, encoding 1 percent of the incoming videos to VP9 would cost about $6 million, for a yearly savings of around $48 million, which will grow as the percentage of VP9 delivered streams grows. These numbers are in the realm of wild guesses, but you can finally get a sniff of why Google bought On2 in the first place.
This article appears in the April 2015 issue of 流媒体 as "超高清的经济学."
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