Stream This: What the CDNs are Charging for Delivery

I have not seen NaviSite’s pricing in a while, so I can’t speak to its average rate. Since Doug Mow left the company I haven’t heard anything from them or seen any RFPs indicating that they have included them. Same goes for VeriSign. I don’t see them being included in RFPs and I have not heard of any customers of late who have signed with them. That’s not to say that no U.S. customers have, but of the ones who’ve called me, none of them were using VeriSign.

As for CacheLogic, they are working on a pricing model that charges customers not per gigabyte delivered but per asset, so I really have no fair way to compare them to the others since it’s a different pricing metric. Level 3 is not yet offering streaming media delivery, so we’ll have to wait until Q4 of this year when their service goes live.

Outside of the smaller regional service providers that are going after smaller customers, that leaves you with the P2P players and companies like Move Networks. Many people think Move Networks distributes its own content, but it doesn’t. They use Mirror Image, Akamai, and Limelight Networks to deliver customers’ content. The bottom line with Move Networks is that you pay a little more than you pay now to a CDN in order to use the Move Networks platform—the value it offers is its platform and technology, not delivery.

That leaves you with the P2P players who to date have not grabbed much market share or convinced content owners to move from CDN to P2P. In many cases, the P2P delivery networks are selling with the pitch that P2P should be replacing a traditional CDN instead of selling it as a complement. Remember, it’s about using the right form(s) of delivery based on the type of content you have, the format it is in, who the viewer is, and the device it’s being played back on.

So with all that being said, below are the going rates for streaming media delivery. These figures are based on actual contracts and RFPs I have seen in the market and from customers telling me on a weekly basis what they are paying. Since last quarter’s pricing, which I also detailed here, the biggest change is at the 50TB-plus per-month commitment. Anything below 50TB has pretty much been level all year. Only above 50TB and really at 100TB and beyond has the price dropped from last quarter.
• 1TB: High $2.00/GB, Low $1.50/GB (no change)
• 5TB: High $1.60/GB, Low $0.95/GB (no change)
• 10TB: High $1.20/GB, Low $0.89/GB (no change)
• 25TB: High $0.95/GB, Low $0.75/GB (no change)
• 50TB: High $0.50/GB, Low $0.40/GB (last quarter high was $0.65/GB, low $0.45/GB)
• 100TB: High $0.24/GB, Low, $0.15/GB (last quarter high was $0.29/GB, low $0.19GB)
• Above 100TB: It’s all over the map. I’ve seen it as low as $0.12GB.

Note that these are the going rates, not necessarily the rates that all customers are being charged. Also, I know some people are going to write in and say that their hosting provider or co-lo facility gives them a cheaper per-gigabyte rate. But I am talking CDNs here, which I classify as those who serve video content via streaming media protocols from multiple locations in the United States and at least one other region of the world like Europe and/or Asia.

I’ve always felt that, as a whole, CDNs try to keep their pricing too secretive. But by doing a little bit of research, it’s not hard for anyone to find out what any provider charges and how that compares to the rest of the market. Yes, there are situations where the above numbers do not apply when it comes to a customer needing something specialized or customized, but that’s not typical. I would encourage all CDN vendors to share more of their pricing data and metrics with the industry, since it’s not a secret anyway. What is the average per-gigabyte price that a CDN charges among all of it’s contracts? Of the customers you sign up each quarter, how many of them are specific to CDN services, and, out of those, what percentage are specific to the delivery of video? There are a lot of metrics like this that providers could break out in the market.

Any CDN interested in publicly sharing this data can email me at the address below, and I’ll post it on my blog, www.businessofvideo.com.