Bandwidth needed to serve video

Question

We are planning on serving some video on our website. In order to do so we are doing some contingency planning around the bandwidth we will use up during peak times.

We are planning on serving a 1 minute video at 150Kbs (we may increase this depending on how much bandwidth we use up). We are steaming the video, rather than embedding it.

In terms of users, we have calculated we should have about 3 users viewing video in any given second. We worked this out from visits to the site over an hour period, so within that hour we can expect this to peak at certain periods.

One formula we looked at was for Flash Media Server (which we are not using) but this formula the user for working out bandwidth probably still applies. We are interested if there is any other way to calculate the bandwidth required, and other 'gotchas' that people may have experienced.

Many thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I can't offer a calculation for how much bandwidth but would add the "Digg Effect" to one of the risks that you could get if it went viral

Answer 2

At any one time - a 5Mb + connection should do you fine, any reasonable host should be able to provide you with this. If you are using shared hosting, you will probably get complaints with this sort of sustained bandwidth.

Also, sorry, I know this is not exactly helpful, but when I was looking at this a while ago for a client, we ended up just using YouTube and it was so much simpler and then others on YouTube can also view it - pulling more people to your site.