Video Bandwidth
& Storage Calculator.

How much does an hour of video actually weigh?

Bitrate is the number everyone quotes and nobody can picture. This calculator turns it into the numbers that show up in a budget: gigabytes per hour, terabytes of library, and terabytes of egress per month. Set a resolution, a codec and a quality tier, or type in a bitrate you measured yourself.

It runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded and no request leaves the page, so you can put your real viewer numbers in without worrying about it. The suggested bitrates come from Apple's HLS Authoring Specification, which publishes a concrete ladder for H.264 and HEVC; AV1 figures are derived from the HEVC rungs and labelled as estimates.

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How the arithmetic works

One number drives everything: the delivered bitrate, which is the video bitrate plus the audio bitrate plus container and protocol overhead. Divide by 8 to get bytes, multiply by the seconds watched, and you have the transfer volume. Every figure below is that same multiplication with different inputs, so you can check any of it by hand.

Two conventions are worth saying out loud. Sizes use decimal gigabytes, because that's what a CDN invoices and what a cloud storage console shows; a "1 TB" plan is 1,000 GB here, not 1,024. And egress counts per play, not per asset: a library of 500 titles streamed 500 times each is a different bill from 500 titles streamed 5 times each, even though the storage line never changes.

Where the suggested bitrates come from

The H.264 and HEVC rungs are Apple's published ladder for HLS delivery, which is the closest thing the industry has to a reference table. Apple lists two rungs for several resolutions; the calculator calls the lower one Standard and the higher one High. Apple's ladder is specified at 30 fps and below, so the 50 and 60 fps options scale the rung by 1.5, which matches how the published 60 fps rungs relate to their 30 fps counterparts.

AV1 has no equivalent published ladder, so its figures are the HEVC rungs reduced by 30 percent, the saving AV1 encoders usually deliver against HEVC at the same quality. Treat them as a planning estimate and confirm with your own encode. That's exactly what the bitrate field is there for.

Four things people get wrong

• Quoting the top rung as the average. An ABR ladder only costs what viewers actually receive. Most playback sits on a middle rung, so sizing egress from the 1080p rung overstates it. Pick the rung you expect to be the average, or use a measured figure.
• Forgetting audio and overhead. Audio adds roughly 100 to 200 kbps, and TS segments add another 5 to 10 percent. On a 1080p asset that's a few percent of the total, and it's exactly the few percent that pushes a monthly bill over a quota.
• Confusing storage with egress. They scale with different things. Storage scales with catalogue size and retention; egress scales with popularity. A small catalogue with one viral title is an egress problem, not a storage one.
• Assuming the ladder is free. Every rendition you add is another full copy in storage and another encode. A five-rung ladder on a large catalogue is five times the storage of a single rendition, which is worth knowing before the encoding queue runs.

Reference ladder

Standard HLS rungs with the storage cost of an hour at each one. Video bitrate only, so add audio and overhead for a delivered figure.

H.264 and HEVC rungs are from Apple's HLS Authoring Specification. Apple's HEVC ladder does not separate 240p from 360p, so both resolutions map to the same rung. AV1 values are HEVC minus 30 percent and are an estimate, not a published ladder.