What bandwidth is required for broadcasting a live video to say 50000 users [closed]

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I am assigned on project to live broadcast an event on the internet which may have 50,000 user s. This will be a broadcast so all users will see same live video. My query is what would be my bandwidth requirement in terms of no of users viewing that stream.

1. I am little confused & the reason is does every users need a separate stream of bandwidth in broadcast ?

2. If i would install a server with streaming capability having Bandwidth of 50Mbps would it be enough considering it is a broadcast.

3. Do i necessarily need to have Class C IP to run streaming server on rtmp protocol.

4. Is is possible to achieve this through RTSP. How do services like Google Hangout air work? What protocol is used in Hangout and Youtube when live broadcasts are done.

Kindly suggest me solution especially mention if you have such practical experiance.

Thanks in Advance

Answer 1

You need a ton of bandwidth and resources.

To calculate how much bandwidth you need, you will need to know your average bitrate for the video. Let's just say that your live video's bitrate is 1 megabit (ignoring overhead, retransmissions, sequences that require more bandwidth, etc.). Your 50Mbps only covers 50 users. That's 0.1% of what you require. You need 1,000 of those connections, to barely handle the load.

If you actually have a live event that 50,000 people will see, you no doubt have sponsors and should be able to afford a proper CDN. This isn't something you host yourself. You pay for a CDN so that capacity is available as you need it, and servers are close to your audience.

The best thing to do would be to get a YouTube account with live streaming, and let YouTube pay for the bandwidth.

Now, the protocol you use has nothing to do with what size of IP block you have. Those are unrelated, separate issues.

RTMP, RTSP, HTTP progressive, etc... if you use a CDN, you get to use all of them with little effort. You pick a streaming protocol based on device compatibility and capability.

Google Hangout works using WebRTC, which is primarily peer-to-peer. When you stream them to YouTube, there is a massive CDN that handles distribution in multiple codecs, multiple protocols, and multiple points of presence.