Ever wonder how much Netflix’s bandwidth costs them? Keep in mind, these fees are in addition to the royalty license they pay the movie studios. Maybe this is why HD on the PC is in no rush for them?
Streaming Media Lately, Akamai has been giving some large companies like Netflix a very discounted rate if the customer agrees to give Akamai at least 51% of their traffic. In exchange, Akamai offers the content owner a highly discounted rate for three of four months as an incentive. In this case, Netflix is paying Akamai about one and half cents per GB delivered for a couple of months before Netflix’s pricing goes back to about six cents per GB delivered. At a penny and half, that’s about 3x cheaper than what Limelight charges Netflix and is at a price that Limelight simply can’t match. While I’m hearing that Netflix just renewed their contract in the new year with Limelight, one has to wonder what Limelight would do in 2011 if Akamai keeps their pricing at this level.
