COMPARE

What a 24/7 channel costs, depending on who you ask.

Three of these six vendors publish no price at all. The three that do put something behind the sticker: a meter on hours and gigabytes, an annual bandwidth allowance that a 24/7 channel spends monthly, or a licence fee with the infrastructure bill arriving separately. A channel here is $254 per month billed yearly, flat, with runtime and delivery included.

Side by side

Six vendors, six ways to be billed.

Every figure here is the vendor’s own, taken from their published material, and each comparison carries the date it was last checked. Where a vendor does not publish something, that is what it says, rather than a claim about what they can do.

Muvi

A headline price with a meter behind it

Plans publish at $199 to $1,999 a month billed annually, and each band includes 10 to 100 streaming hours. A 24/7 channel runs about 730 of them. Past the band it is $1 per hour and $0.09 per gigabyte delivered, so both meters keep counting for as long as the channel is on air.

Run their published rates

Amagi

A quote, or a clock

CLOUDPORT is quote-based, so the first real number arrives after a conversation. The pay-as-you-go edition does publish one: $4.10 per playout hour, which across the roughly 730 hours a month a linear channel runs is about $2,993 before a single viewer, plus $30 per terabyte delivered.

See it costed out

Janya

$1,500 a month, before the AWS bill

Their AWS Marketplace listing prices one feed at $1,500 a month and calls it licence only, so compute, storage and bandwidth arrive separately. The minimum term is twelve months, which commits $18,000 before the first frame. It is the traditional managed model, which also means a schedule change goes through their operations process instead of your own afternoon.

Compare the control

Lightcast

Metered by your own audience

No prices published, and plans sized by streaming minutes using their own published formula: viewers times average watch time times frequency. A linear channel accumulates minutes continuously rather than per episode, so ten people watching around the clock is roughly 438,000 minutes a month, and about 137 continuous viewers reaches the 6,000,000 of their largest published band.

Follow the numbers

Dacast

A yearly allowance, spent monthly

Plans publish at $39, $63 and $165 a month billed annually, each carrying a bandwidth allowance of 2.4 TB, 6 TB or 24 TB a year that their own overage FAQ treats as a monthly allotment. One person watching a 720p stream around the clock uses about 985 GB a month, and past the allotment the published rate is $0.30 per gigabyte, or the stream shuts off.

See where the prices cross

VPlayed

Five competitors priced, themselves never

Their comparison pages print a monthly price beside five named competitors and $0 beside VPlayed. The only figure their own material attaches to the product is a FAQ answer of $10,000 to $50,000, paid once for a platform you host yourself, with customization billed on top of it per their own terms.

Read the published record

The test

One number prices any vendor

A linear channel runs about 730 hours every month whether or not anybody is watching, and every concurrent viewer turns that runtime into delivered gigabytes. That is the number a headline price is designed not to meet. An entry tier sized for 10 streaming hours, or a rate quoted per hour, or a plan sized by how long your audience watched, all behave the same way once the channel simply stays on.

So ask any vendor the same two questions before signing: what does this cost at 730 hours a month, and what does it cost when the audience doubles? Then ask for both answers in writing.

The answer here needs no calculator

$254 per month billed yearly, per channel, published. Runtime is not metered, because a channel is expected to run continuously, and delivery is unlimited from 300+ cities on every plan, so the biggest night the channel ever has costs what the quietest one does. The only usage-priced item is ad serving at $1 per 1,000 delivery-confirmed impressions, which bills only after an ad has already earned its place. What a TV channel costs runs every one of these published rates out to a full year.

There is no contract, and the first purchase carries a 7-day money-back guarantee, so testing the claim costs a week rather than a procurement cycle. If a figure here has gone out of date, tell us and it gets corrected.

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