Free tool
Video bandwidth calculator
Delivery is the line item that surprises people, and it is the one you can work out in advance. Set the quality you publish at, the audience you expect and how long they watch, and you get a planning estimate in terabytes per month — a starting figure to size a plan against, not a promise about what your viewers will do.
What adaptive delivery does to the number
lower renditions reduce delivered bytes
- Mobile
- Wifi
- Broadband
- Fibre
Video streaming bandwidth calculator
Estimate your monthly streaming usage
Start from a resolution preset, then adjust for your own audience. The result updates as you type. The presets are common starting bitrates offered as inputs — they are not measured averages of your content or anyone else’s, so replace them with your own encoder settings if you know them.
Estimated monthly bandwidth
0.11TB / month
1.13 GB per viewer · 2.25 GB per viewer-hour
See which plan covers this →Planning estimate, not a ceiling. Adaptive delivery can put real usage below this figure — or equal to it, if everyone watches at the top of the ladder — while seeking, replays, protocol overhead and player behaviour move delivered bytes in both directions. Presets are common starting bitrates, not measured averages.
How we calculate
The maths, so you can check it
01
Bitrate to data rate
Kilobits per second divided by eight gives kilobytes per second; multiply by sixty for the data in one minute of watching.
02
Times minutes, times viewers
Multiply by average watch time, then by monthly viewers, for the total data delivered in a month.
03
To decimal gigabytes and terabytes
Divide the kilobytes by 1,000,000 for decimal GB, or by 1,000,000,000 for decimal TB. These are decimal units, not binary ones — the figure your plan’s delivery allowance has to cover.
Questions
Video bandwidth FAQ
Bandwidth, in plain English.
How much bandwidth does video streaming use?
Roughly, one hour of 1080p at 5,000 kbps is about 2.25 GB delivered per viewer. Halve the bitrate and you halve the data; double the audience and you double it. The calculator above does this for your own numbers.
What bitrate should I use for video streaming?
The presets here are common starting points — 4K around 15,000 kbps, 1080p around 5,000, 720p around 4,000, 480p around 2,500 and 360p around 1,400 — offered as calculator inputs rather than as measured averages. Your own encoder settings are the better input if you have them. With adaptive HLS you do not have to pick a single rate: a ladder is prepared and each viewer receives the rendition their connection can hold.
Does adaptive bitrate streaming change my real usage?
It can. Viewers on constrained connections receive lower renditions, so delivery can land below an estimate built from your peak rendition — or equal to it, if your audience all watch at the top of the ladder. Other things move the figure too, and not only downwards: seeking and replays deliver bytes more than once, and protocol overhead, player behaviour and your source media all count. Treat the result as a planning estimate, not a guaranteed ceiling.
How do I estimate live streaming bandwidth?
The same arithmetic, with one input that catches people out: use AVERAGE concurrent viewers over the event, not the peak. Multiply bitrate by event length by average concurrency. Peak concurrency multiplied by the full event length assumes every viewer who ever joined watched every minute, which overstates a real event — often by a lot, since audiences arrive late and leave early.
How much bandwidth does DynTube include?
Included delivery differs by plan and is published on the pricing page, which always reflects current terms. Work out your estimate here first, then compare it against the delivery band on the plan you are considering — and read the fair-use page so you know where the boundaries sit before you need them.
Now see what that delivery costs
Take the estimate to the pricing page and read it against the current delivery bands. Which plan covers your figure, and what each one includes, comes from the live catalogue rather than from this tool — and protection modes in particular are entitlement-dependent, so confirm yours before designing around them.