Live Streaming Bandwidth Calculator

Quick Bitrate Presets

Presets reflect VdoCipher’s efficient live encoding profiles, tuned to deliver strong visual quality at lower bitrates than typical default presets. Adjust upward for fast-motion sports/action or high frame-rate streams, and downward for low-motion talk/webinar content.

Live stream bitrate (kbps)

Tip: This should be your average delivered bitrate.

Average Concurrent Live Viewers

How many concurrent viewers you are expecting to watch the live session.

Average Watch Time (minutes)

How long in minutes your live stream will be viewed or length of stream.

Per viewer Data Transfer

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Estimated Bandwidth Required (GB)

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These figures are estimates based on peak concurrent delivery and VdoCipher’s optimized live encoding and delivery pipeline. Actual bandwidth usage may vary with scene complexity, viewer concurrency spikes, adaptive bitrate (ABR) switching, device/network conditions, protocol/container overhead, and player retries/rebuffering behavior.

What is a Live Streaming Bandwidth Calculator?

A Live Streaming Bandwidth Calculator estimates the peak bandwidth (egress rate) required to deliver a live stream to your audience, based on a few key inputs:

Live stream bitrate (kbps): the average output bitrate you encode/publish for the live stream (video + audio)
Peak concurrent viewers: how many viewers will be watching at the same time during your highest traffic moment
Streaming duration (minutes): used to estimate total data transfer for the full live event

It outputs:

Per-viewer data transfer (MB per viewer for the chosen watch time)
Total bandwidth required (GB) for the full live event duration

This is mainly used for capacity planning (avoiding buffering at peak moments) and forecasting live streaming delivery costs.

How does a Live Streaming Bandwidth Calculator work?

For live streaming, bandwidth planning is primarily about simultaneous delivery. Your total required bandwidth scales with:

how many viewers are watching at the same time (peak concurrency), and
how many bits per second you deliver per viewer (bitrate).

Core calculation (Live peak egress estimate)

If you input:

bitrate_kbps (kilobits per second per viewer)
watch_minutes
peak_viewers

Then:

Convert watch time to seconds - duration_seconds = watch_minutes × 60
Compute total bits delivered - total_bits = bitrate_kbps × 1000 × duration_seconds × avg_concurrent_viewers
Convert to bytes - total_bytes = total_bits / 8
Convert to GB - total_GB = total_bytes / 1,000,000,000

Note: for real live events, concurrency is not constant. Total transfer is best estimated using an average concurrency across the event (or using analytics from past events).

Other FAQs

What does “bitrate” mean in live streaming?

Bitrate is the amount of data your encoder sends per second. In live streaming this is typically your constant/average publish bitrate (video + audio) for a given rendition. If you stream multiple renditions (ABR), the delivered bitrate can vary per viewer depending on device and network conditions.

Should I enter the max bitrate or the average bitrate?

For live, use the actual encoded/published bitrate you send to your streaming server for the rendition you expect most viewers to receive. If you deliver ABR (multiple renditions), use a weighted average delivered bitrate based on your expected audience mix.

Why is live bandwidth planning different from VOD?

VOD planning is usually about total data transfer (GB) over time. Live planning is often about peak throughput (Mbps/Gbps) during the event’s busiest moment. A short spike in concurrency can cause buffering if the delivery pipeline isn’t sized for peak.

If I use adaptive bitrate (ABR) for live, how do I estimate bandwidth?

Estimate a weighted average delivered bitrate using your expected distribution (example: 20% on 1080p, 50% on 720p, 30% on 480p). Multiply that weighted average by peak concurrency for peak egress.