Streaming viewership continues to grow — not only in the U.S. as shown by Nielsen’s The Gauge, but also globally. In Europe, TF1 and RTL mention in their Q1 2025 financial reports that their respective streaming platforms increased digital ad revenue by approximately 30% year-over-year.
At the same time, many streaming platforms remain unprofitable and still require significant investment to drive innovation in user engagement, monetization, robustness and operational efficiency.
Due to this duality, service providers and broadcasters are looking at cost-effective and future-ready solutions when updating their streaming platform.
This blog discusses how the streaming video pipeline — from ingesting live and file-based content to delivering it to the CDN — can be cost optimized for telcos and cable operators while remaining flexible enough to support emerging capabilities.
TCO of Key Components in the Streaming Video Pipeline
Streaming workflows can be deployed independently in the public cloud or on-premises with equal technical performances, making the decision to deploy in either environment purely a business one.
There are several key video pipeline components for streaming platforms. Streaming platforms ingest linear channels and VOD assets. In addition, they transcode, encrypt and package video content. VOD, live to VOD and nPVR assets are encoded and stored. Another critical element is the origin servers that are connected to the streamer’s CDN. As we are focusing our TCO analysis on telcos and cable operators, origin servers are primarily feeding the operator’s on-net CDN.
Here we will compare the cost of storage, compute and networking in the cloud vs. on-premises for a streaming platform over a five-year period. The platform is designed to encode 100 HD linear channels in MPEG-4 AVC with 4 PB of storage for nPVR and VOD assets and 50 PB egress per month streamed over the on-net and off-net CDN.
For the on-premises scenario, the cost of electricity, air conditioning, racks, SLA and the professional services required to install the streaming platform have been considered over a five-year period. However, these costs can vary across continents.
The cloud scenario assumes compute resources are reserved and committed for five years.
The table below provides the results of this TCO analysis.
The labor cost savings are highly variable, as some operators can or cannot share their engineering team across the different activities of the company, including their own network, IT, video platforms and back office.
Compute resources needed for 24x7 linear encoding and origin are quite static over time. As a result, it is not surprising that these resources are cheaper when deployed on-premises.
Similarly, the TCO analysis shows that the public cloud is efficient for storage and networking due to economy of scale and the extensive experience cloud providers have in storing large amounts of data in their data centers. This is a trend that AI amplifies every day.
For telcos and cable operators, the egress cost to feed their on-net CDN from the public cloud should be considered in the overall TCO.
Based on these comparative costs, a logical approach to optimizing the TCO of the streaming video pipeline is to adopt a hybrid model that orchestrates content across on-premises and public cloud resources, as illustrated in the diagram below.
Figure 1. Harmonic’s hybrid streaming solution leverages VOS360 Media SaaS in the cloud for long-term nPVR content and VOS Media Software on-premises for fresh content.
All linear channel encoding is performed on-premises. Some on-premises resources are also deployed for business-as-usual file transcoding. On-premises storage is limited to fresh content like recent VOD, nPVR and catch-up TV assets.
The on-net CDN pulls the fresh, newly released and consequently most popular content directly from the on-premises origin servers.
As soon as the content stored on-premises is beyond a certain age, it is automatically migrated into the public cloud and stored in cold storage to optimize costs. Egress costs from the public cloud remain low as the content is much less popular and less accessed.
This hybrid streaming architecture is not only cost-optimized but also provides the flexibility service providers need to dynamically shift workloads to the public cloud for instance to ensure the scalability required during peak traffic for high-profile live events such as major sports broadcasts.
Furthermore, Harmonic’s hybrid streaming solution improves disaster recovery by protecting their on-premises infrastructure and maintain service uptime during major site failures.
A crucial aspect of the hybrid streaming solution is its central management system that ensures smooth operation of the streaming platform across both on-premises and cloud environments. This is simplified by the fact VOS360 Media and VOS Media Software share the same API and underlying software foundation.
Central orchestration first automates the content migration from on-premises to the cloud, based on rules such as content freshness and popularity. Content migration is transparent to the content management system (CMS), ensuring seamless operations.
Through the central management system UI, operators easily create, configure and monitor any linear channel on the streaming platform, deciding whether to run it on premises only. Operators can also add temporary resources to the public to cope with peak demand situations such as streaming a high-profile live event or transcoding a full-content library from a major streaming partner (e.g. Disney+) in a very short period, avoiding costly overprovisioning of on-premises resources.
Future-Proof Streaming Starts with a Hybrid Foundation
Hybrid streaming empowers service providers to boost efficiency, reduce costs and scale their video streaming services across cloud and on-premises infrastructure. By partnering with Harmonic, service providers can lead the hybrid streaming transformation with innovative SaaS and software-based solutions that simplify operations via a central orchestration, enhance viewer experiences and deliver the flexibility needed to thrive in an evolving media landscape.