Egress is the live-streaming meter
A live stream bill is viewers times bitrate times time. Adaptive bitrate and committed CDN rates cut it hard. Size encoding separately on the video transcoding calculator and delivery on the CDN bandwidth calculator.
Streaming: the egress iceberg
Live streaming stacks three meters: ingest (usually free), transcoding (per input minute — a 6-rendition ladder on a 3-hour stream runs $5–$15), and delivery, which dwarfs both. Delivery = viewers × bitrate × duration: 1,000 viewers watching a 4 Mbps stream for an hour move ~1.8TB — $15–$150 depending on CDN rates. That delivery line explains the entire industry structure: it's why Twitch can't pay creators more, and why every serious streaming business negotiates CDN commit contracts. Multi-CDN routing and per-title bitrate optimization are the levers that actually move the bill.