In preparing for Monday's public FCC hearing, I decided to do a bit of research into how much money an organization can save by using bittorrent. It turns out that the savings are pretty amazing!

As you will see, Democracy Now! has a fixed cost of roughly $200 per month (the service is donated) for distributing their news program at full resolution. Compare that to a bill for serving direct HTTP downloads using Amazon's S3 service, which would currently sit at roughly $1200 per month and would increase with viewership.

Arriving at these numbers began with an email to Democracy Now!'s resident hacker, Mike Castleman. Based on the information he sent me, I calculated the following:

Current Traffic of Full-Res Video @ Democracy Now!

• Viewers/Downloaders per Day: 400-1000
• Average Video Size: 440 MB
• Total Bandwidth Transfer per Month: 7-8 Terabytes

As for the cost, they priced out a dedicated server for bittorrent delivery and found that it would be about $200 per month (someone donated the service in the mean time). I decided to compare this to Amazon's S3 hosting and delivery service, which would be a pretty standard choice for an organization of this size.

Cost: HTTP

• Total Bandwidth Transfer per Month: 7-8 Terabytes
• Price per Gigabyte of Transfer (@ < 10 Terabytes): 18 cents
• Monthly Cost for Amazon S3: $1100 - $1500 (increasing with viewership)

Cost: Bittorrent

• Total Bandwidth Transfer per Month: irrelevant
• Monthly Cost for Bittorrent Server: $200 (doesn't increase with viewership)

Interesting Note: Amazon S3 supports the bittorrent protocol. In the right situation, this can serve as a great solution for saving money on bandwidth.