So, I’m trying to understand if Wowza will be cost effective for the application I have in mind. I manage a network of 9 radio stations, two of which have online players. The cost per month seems high, we pay $200 per month, per each stream, for a 128kbps audio stream and they provide a player through their site; hardware also comes out at a one time fee of $1000 for the encoding box.
This approach has disadvantages beyond cost, the current setup only allows for us to play out ‘on-air’ feeds, which is effective for those who want to listen to what’s on the radio, but not if we wanted to stream something that wouldn’t necessarily be put on-air; to accomplish this would cost an additional $200 per moth and the $1000 hardware fee. Add-ons for this service, such as cloud logging - mp3 recordings stored in the cloud - cost an additional $100-$200 onto the base service.
Roughly, we are paying $400 a month right now for two 128kbps streams and would be paying $1800 per month if we scaled this to all nine stations. Maximum concurrent users will hit about 200 on any stream, average listening time is 30 minutes. If anyone could give me a quick rundown, especially how costs scale as you add more concurrent streams, it would be greatly appreciated; my intuition tells me that Wowza is likely more cost effective as I incorporate more stations under this system. I’ve been considering spinning up an instance of Wowza on Azure, so I don’t know how that would weigh into the discussion.
