Egress (video delivery)
Egress, in video delivery, is data leaving a provider's network: from cloud storage, an origin server or a CDN out to viewers or to other systems. Cloud and CDN providers usually meter it per gigabyte and bill it separately from storage. Every minute of video watched creates egress, and so does every byte a player downloads ahead and never shows. For a streaming service it is often the line that grows fastest, because it scales with audience size, watch time and bitrate at once.
How is video egress calculated?
At its simplest, egress is bitrate multiplied by time delivered, summed over every view. One large streaming service lists up to 3 GB per hour for HD and up to 7 GB per hour for 4K, which shows how much the rendition played changes the data behind the same hour of viewing.
In a real delivery stack there are several egress points. CDN egress is data sent from edge servers to viewers, and is usually the largest. Origin egress is data sent from storage to the CDN to fill caches after a miss. Cross-region transfer is data moved between a provider's own regions, for example when the origin sits in one region and processing runs in another. Each is metered on its own line, often at different rates by region.
That is why two services with the same watch time can see very different egress: the ladder, the cache hit ratio and the architecture all change the gigabytes.
Egress vs. ingress
Ingress is data coming into a provider: uploads of source files, imports from another bucket, and live encoder feeds arriving at an ingest server. Egress is data going out. Most cloud providers charge little or nothing for ingress and meter egress per gigabyte, because outbound traffic is what costs them network capacity.
For video the two are lopsided. A one-hour upload is ingested once. That same hour may be watched thousands of times, and every view is egress. A live stream works the same way: one encoder feed comes in, and the whole audience is served out.
The imbalance shapes architecture decisions. Moving a library between providers, sending files to a separate transcoding service in another cloud, or serving viewers from a region far from the origin can all turn into egress. Keeping encoding, storage and delivery in one place avoids many of those transfers.
What drives video egress costs?
Bitrate is the largest lever. Sending a high rendition to a small phone screen costs data the viewer cannot see. A single progressive MP4 makes this worse, because every viewer gets the full-quality file whatever their screen or network.
Wasted downloads come next. A progressive MP4 often downloads well ahead of the viewer, and a streaming player with a long forward buffer does the same. If the viewer leaves early, that data was paid for and never watched. Short-form feeds, where many views last only seconds, are especially exposed.
Cache efficiency matters on the origin side. Every cache miss pulls a segment from origin storage, which adds origin egress on top of CDN egress. A large long-tail library has more misses than a small catalog of hits.
Then there is audience shape. A live final or a viral clip concentrates demand into hours, and per-gigabyte billing turns that spike straight into a larger bill.
How do you reduce video egress?
Send fewer bits per minute watched. Encode with HEVC or AV1 where devices support them, keeping H.264 for the rest. Use per-title encoding so simple content gets a smaller ladder. Cap the top rendition at the resolution your viewers' screens can show, and let the player limit rendition size to the player window.
Waste less. Replace progressive MP4 with adaptive streaming, so the player downloads a few seconds ahead instead of the whole file. Keep the forward buffer sensible for the content type.
Cache better. An origin shield in front of storage absorbs repeated misses, so the origin sends each segment once instead of once per edge. Keep storage, packaging and delivery in the same place to avoid cross-region and cross-provider transfer.
Finally, look at the billing model. Per-gigabyte egress grows with bitrate. A per-minute delivery price makes the bill track watch time, and leaves bitrate as a quality decision rather than a cost one.
How does FastPix handle egress?
FastPix does not send a separate egress bill. Ingress, egress, request charges and cross-region transfer are bundled into the per-minute streaming price, so delivery is billed per minute watched rather than per gigabyte sent, at a rate that depends on resolution. Volume discounts apply automatically. MP4 downloads, where you offer them, count as minutes streamed. Live viewing is billed per viewer-minute.
The engineering still keeps data per view down. Each upload gets a per-title ladder in H.264 and HEVC (H.265) as standard, with AV1 available on request, delivered as HLS and DASH, so a phone receives a rendition sized for it rather than a full-quality file. You can cap the top resolution at 720p, 1080p, 2K or 4K. Delivery runs on a multi-CDN network of 300+ points of presence, and video and images can be served from your own custom domain. thumbnail images are resized at request time with width, height, a fit mode such as intellicrop and jpg, png or webp output, so a grid of webp posters does not ship full-size frames.
On Android, FastPix Player's disk caching plays re-watches and scroll-backs from local storage instead of downloading the same segments again (preload and cache).
Video Data shows how data turns into viewing: time-weighted average bitrate, watch time and exits before video start for every view, broken down by country, CDN and ASN.
Standard encoding is free up to 4K and billed per source minute, not per rendition. Storage is billed per rendition-minute each month, so the resolution cap shapes it. The free plan includes 10 videos and 100,000 streaming minutes a month, with no card needed.
By the numbers
- Netflix lists data use of up to 3 GB per hour for high definition and up to 7 GB per hour for Ultra HD (4K). (Netflix Help: How to control how much data Netflix uses)
