Why does This American Life pay $150K/year for bandwidth?

I don’t know the answer – but I was just thinking the same thing after listening to Ira ask (beg) for money at the end of a recent podcast.

Kris Arnold did the math and thinks TAL could save $50K/year by using Amazon S3. I find that very believable. Is there a way to make it cost even less than that?

Bandwidth is expensive. As a general rule downloading is “cheap” and uploading is “expensive”. Think of downloading as “offloading” the network and uploading as “loading up”.

Using a service like Amazon S3 gives you some advantages due to sharing scaling with Amazon and its other clients.

The easiest way to lower the cost of something like a podcast / streaming services like radio is to use geographically located proxies. This is complicated and expensive. S3 won’t even do this for you. In order to get this sort of “geocaching” you need to hire a company like Alexia to cache your data globally and serve it up to and end user a geographically local as possible. Super expen$ive, but worth it if you are say… Clear Channel and your bandwidth bill is in the $millions / month.

It should also be noted that switching to Amazon S3 or other high end hosting services is not trival. Amazon S3 is not your typical hosting provider and you do not just get an FTP access to an apache server in the traditional sense. Amazon S3 is a framework built and resold to companies who want to use the Amazon infrastructure, the cost to deploy such a solution might even outweigh the benefit of $50k / year. Developers are expensive, also.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

@bob Great question!

I was just thinking about this myself. It’s also worth noting that if you’re serving this kind of data, there are much better deals than S3. I bet they could rebuild using a lightweight setup (maybe an unmetered colo?) and get down to more like 50k a year. Also, doesn’t Apple host most of their podcasts on iTunes?

One way or the other, it really feels like they’re getting fleeced.