Being cost effected with a bandwidth for a streaming service

Question

Basically, I'm about to launch a music streaming app, and I'm trying to figure out cost.

Cloud services like S3 and RackSpace cloud are expensive. As far as scalability is concerned... I'm assumign that an average user listens to music for an hour and lets say our app scales to 100,000's of users. It's about 90MB / hour per user of bandwidth... Let's make another assumption and say that we have an average of 10,000 concurrent users streaming music in a 24 hour period (90MB (avg/hr) * 10k * 24 = 21,600,000MB = ~20.5 TB)... That's a shit load of bandwidth! According to Rackspace's pricing, that's $3,780 USD per day... holllllly crap! Anoher thing, services like Rdio, Grooveshark, etc have roughly 15 million (licensed) songs... If I through that into the mix, that's 15,000,000 * 3MB (avg song) = 43,945GB = $4,300 a month.

So at these rates, companies like Rdio and Grooveshark, etc, in no way pay this much.

So my question is simple... generally, what are some routes to take when creating a streaming service? Being specific would earn my vote! (AKA, links to well rated companies offering cheaper CDN services or unmetered colocation for a flat rate)

Thanks duders!

More)

Application servers will be hosted on Rackspace... but this is somewhat irrelevant considering the fact that I really just need a fast "cdn"

Answer 1

Look at accelerating load balancers like jetNEXUS. They are very simple to set up and use techniques like static caching HTML muxing and compression to dramatically reduce the amount of data hitting the actual servers. This can save you a ton of money in bandwidth costs. I think Rackspace has some Zeus or Jetnexus offerings, and I know that it's available as an option on Amazon's Cloud.

Answer 2

There are plenty of of ways to reduce that cost. I know Spotify do the following (among other things):

1. Cache the songs locally.
2. Use P2P to download from other clients (they mainly use the server to guarantee low latency).
3. Only allow high bit-rates for paying users.

I recommend you read the following: http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/

If you're looking for cheap hosting then I suggest you check out: http://www.hetzner.de/. I haven't used them but I've heard lots good things about them.