Video Streaming Bandwidth Calculator

Work out video streaming bandwidth instantly with clear inputs, formula shown and shareable results.

About Video Streaming Bandwidth Calculator

Edge bandwidth is viewers times per-stream bitrate plus protocol overhead, and it scales linearly — 5,000 concurrent 1080p streams is over 33 Gbps. What makes streaming viable is caching: at a 92 percent hit rate the origin sees only 8 percent of that, which is why CDN hit rate is the single most important number in a streaming architecture.

Formula

Streaming bandwidth

edge = viewers x bitrate x (1 + overhead); origin = edge x (1 - cache hit rate)

Worked example

With the default values below, Video Streaming Bandwidth Calculator returns Edge bandwidth required of 33.60. Change any input above and every figure here is recalculated in your browser.

Inputs used

Concurrent viewersminimum 1: 5,000
Stream qualityone of 480p (~1.5 Mbps), 720p (~3 Mbps), 1080p (~6 Mbps), 4K HDR (~25 Mbps): 1080p (~6 Mbps)
Protocol and ABR overheadaccepts 0–100 %: 12 %
CDN cache hit rateaccepts 0–100 %: 92 %

Results

Edge bandwidth required: 33.60 Gbps
Origin bandwidth after caching: 2.688 Gbps
Bandwidth per stream including overhead: 6.72 Mbps
Egress per hour: 13.75 TiB

Step by step

1Values used
2Streaming bandwidth
3Edge bandwidth required= 33.60 Gbps
4Origin bandwidth after caching= 2.688 Gbps
5Bandwidth per stream including overhead= 6.72 Mbps
6Egress per hour= 15,120,000,000,000

Assumptions and limits

The result is derived only from the 4 inputs listed above. Anything not among them is not part of the calculation.
In particular, this calculator does not take inflation, tax, fees or charges or compounding frequency into account.
Figures are rounded for display to 3 decimal places, so totals built from several rounded parts can differ slightly from the unrounded arithmetic.

How these calculators are built and tested is described on the Methodology page. If a figure looks wrong, please report it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is the cache hit rate not 100 percent?

Live streams have new segments constantly, and long-tail catalogues have unpopular titles that expire between requests. Popular VOD content approaches 99 percent.

Does adaptive bitrate reduce total bandwidth?

It matches quality to each viewer's connection, so average bitrate falls below the maximum ladder rung. Sizing on the top rung is conservative but safe.