Metered delivery was designed for on-demand libraries, where a quiet month genuinely is a cheap month because nothing plays unless somebody presses play. A linear channel breaks that assumption on day one. It runs around the clock, roughly 730 hours a month, and every concurrent viewer multiplies that runtime into delivered gigabytes. The bill therefore tracks your success rather than your usage, and the better the channel does, the harder it is punished.
The arithmetic is worth doing before signing anything. A viewer averaging 3 Mbps across the adaptive ladder consumes about 1.35 GB per hour. A hundred people watching continuously for a month is roughly 73,000 viewer-hours, which is close to 98 TB handed to viewers. Run that through published rates and the delivery line alone comes to about $8,870 a month at $0.09 per GB, or about $2,957 at $30 per TB. Neither figure includes the playout itself. Both are the cost of the channel simply being watched.
Unlimited means unlimited bytes, and the plan sets the ceiling
Precision matters here, because vendors are slippery about it. Bandwidth on LIVEPLUSTV is genuinely unmetered on every plan: there is no per-GB rate, no allowance, and no overage line on any invoice. What scales with the plan is concurrent viewers, 250 on Launch, 2,500 on FAST, 5,000 on Studio and uncapped on Custom, each doubling once the channel runs ads. So the question at renewal is never how much your audience watched, only how many of them turned up at once. Those are very different conversations to have with a finance team, and only one of them makes a growing channel nervous.
Delivery and measurement are the same layer
Because the stream is served from our own network, the point of delivery is also the point of record. Ad segments are counted when they are actually fetched at the edge rather than when a player asks for them, which is what makes an impression worth billing to an advertiser. The same applies to the audience figures: viewers, watch time and city-level geography in your channel analytics come from where the stream met a person. That is also why server-side ad insertion is included on every plan rather than sold as a tier, since the delivery network doing the stitching is the one already carrying your channel.
What this means when you are choosing
A flat, unlimited delivery model is the only one under which a 24/7 channel can grow without a procurement conversation attached to every good night. Run your own numbers at your own audience size with the calculator on the Cloud Playout pricing page, and check them against published competitor rates on the cost of starting a TV channel. If you are moving a channel off satellite, the same maths decides whether streaming is cheaper than the transponder you are retiring.