We did a small survey of how a range of companies are charging for their Live Streaming services & in a nutshell, this is what we found…
At the low end we typically got quotes from vendors for encoding services only, of around $1500 per day (on average) of encode, while one of them gave us a price break for the 2nd consecutive day for $1000.
Note: when they say encoding only, they mean that the client must provide a video/audio feed from the client’s video camera and the vendor would merely only ‘encode’ the signal and send it to the CDN (ie. Content Delivery Network) for distribution to the viewing audience.
Also to be noted, these quotes were for a single camera feed (or if multiple cameras were involved, it was the client’s responsibility to have the feeds mixed live and to send a single, pre-mixed feed to the vendor for encoding and delivery.
When we asked smaller local companies for quotes for multi-camera shoots, that’s when the pricing really went up. For a 3 camera shoot (including 3 crew members) plus a live switcher and audio insertion, the low end was $7500 and it went up to a high of $12,000 per day.
When we asked for a 3-camera shoot with live switching controlled by a single crew member (who manned a live switcher controlling 3 static cameras) plus the encoding, we were quoted an a low of $4500 per day, going as high as $6000 per day.
Note: this was without any bells and whistles like Interactive Chat, archival copies of the videocast footage, additional viewer streams, etc. Some of them even wanted to charge an extra fee for the pre-setup and site visit (which we think is overdoing it a bit).
At the extreme high end, “typical” costs from a couple of well known, large A/V providers for a full 3 camera crew with encoding ranged from $10k to $15k per day – and the benefits were not any better than what was offered by the smaller companies.