Free Live Streaming Platform With No Catches? Red5 Cloud’s Pay-As-You-Grow Plan Beats the Competition 

Choosing a free live streaming platform often feels like a trap, filled with hidden limits, vague terms, and surprise charges. In this post, we break down how Red5 Cloud’s new Pay-As-You-Grow plan delivers real-time streaming with a truly free tier, offering 50 GB and 6,000 instance hours every month at no cost. Unlike competitors like Agora, whose “free” offers come with fine print, Red5 Cloud keeps things transparent and scalable from day one.

Red5 Cloud Pay-As-You-Grow Plan

With real-time streaming use cases driving a surge in new business strategies worldwide, Red5 is knocking down barriers to entry by eliminating the costs of bringing opportunities to life on the fully managed Red5 Cloud service.

This is the latest step in a far-reaching cost-reduction initiative Red5 has introduced to ensure the market-leading real-time multidirectional streaming capabilities of Red5 Cloud can be implemented at or better than cost/benefit parity with conventional HTTP-based streaming. From now on, strategists will have a much stronger case than ever when they take their next-gen growth plans to front offices and investors for approval.

Happily, Red5, while well ahead of competitors on the cost/benefit front, isn’t alone in addressing the long-standing perception that WebRTC-based streaming is cost prohibitive. As can be seen in a growing number of cost-saving initiatives in the real-time streaming space, it’s inevitable that expansion of the aggregate global user base should lead to lowering the cost hurdles to activating real-time video use cases. Afterall, just about any time a new technology gets to mainstream usage scales, per-customer costs go down.

Starting Out at $0 Streaming Costs

A screenshot showing the features available in the Red5 Cloud Pay-As-You-Grow plan.

That said, there’s nothing that matches the combination of increased functionality at reduced spending now available to Red5 Cloud customers, including developers and startups that need to be able to get underway and keep going at no or minimal costs. Not only does Red5 Cloud enable an unprecedented range of multidirectional streaming applications at industry-leading end-to-end latencies persistently registering 250ms or less; we’re making this possible at startup and higher usage levels far below the charges incurred elsewhere.

Unlike one-time free test offers with low usage ceilings, Red5 Cloud’s Pay-as-You-Grow plan allows entry-level customers to stream up to 50 gigabytes consuming up to 6,000 instance hours per month at no cost on a continuing basis. Pay-As-You-Grow customers can extend their real-time multidirectional streaming reach from our U.S. Central regional facilities without so much as entering their credit or debit card payment data unless monthly usage exceeds the 50 GB threshold.

In any month when these customers go above 50 GB, they pay just $0.08 per GB and $0.69 per instance hour, reverting to free usage in the succeeding month at or below 50 GB. Moreover, Red5 Cloud’s transcoding support for streaming content in multiple adaptive bitrate (ABR) profiles over our Experience Delivery Network (XDN) infrastructure is included at no extra charge under this plan, just as it is with our other pricing tiers.

Full-Scale Operations at Much Lower Costs

Any time customers reach the point where they want to scale to much higher monthly volumes of output that can be delivered to any number of users numbering into the millions at continental and transcontinental distances, they can seamlessly transition to use of Red5 Cloud resources running on the global Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Whether or not they get started on the Pay-as-You-Grow plan, customers can achieve these usage levels at industry-leading cost efficiencies by capitalizing on the lower charges we’re now assessing through our revised Growth and Enterprise Plans.

The Growth Plan’s all-inclusive monthly price, not counting usage discounts, is just $999 for 10,000 GB of streaming and 10,000 instance hours, with prices for overages set at $0.05 per GB and $0.37 per instance hour. The monthly cost includes multi-regional support covering unlimited scaling across ten globally distributed regions.

Moreover, there are no limits on access to our transcoding and Live Mixer systems. Nor are there any limits to use of the Stream Manager API, which allows Red5 Cloud customers to manage and control streaming workflows, monitor stream health and easily build the wide range of applications supported by our application toolsets. With control settings that can be configured programmatically, these are the technologies that are key to the unparalleled use case diversity and development flexibility customers attain with Red5 Cloud, as explained at greater length below.

The baseline Growth Plan and overage prices cover all bandwidth transfer costs (ingress and egress) plus resource usage as measured in instance hours, which is analogous to how instance charges are levied by virtualized cloud computing operators for virtual machine (VM) usage. Notably, with continuation of instance usage pricing, the revised Growth Plan sustains what has always been the pay-as-you-go aspect to leveraging the Red5 Cloud service, which means there are no charges assessed for usage when cloud resources aren’t supporting active operations.

This is the case because the automated use of XDN Architecture enabled by Red5 Cloud allows customers with a click on their dashboards to deactivate server resources reserved for their use when they’re not needed. When customers hit the prompt to reactivate usage, the resources dedicated to their operations are instantly available.

Our other pricing tier, the Enterprise Plan, takes a customer-specific approach to pricing for large-scale implementations of Red5 Cloud with baseline costs covering 20,000 GB of streaming and 10,000 instance hours per month and the same attributes pertaining to unlimited scaling and access to transcoding, Live Mixer and Stream Manager API components. Usage overage rates are the same at $0.05 per GB and $0.37 per instance hour.

Beyond the higher streaming capacity before overage rates kick in, Enterprise custom pricing covers charges for setting and confirming conformity with terms of service-level agreements (SLAs) and whatever is needed in the way of support for documentation, emails, a private Slack channel or 24/7 phone access to customer service personnel. Negotiated rates also cover any costs incurred with technical staff support for custom feature development, and they include discounts for high levels of GB streaming and instance-hour consumption.

The Market Trend Toward Lower Real-Time Streaming Costs

Looking at the cost patterns emerging in the real-time streaming sector, it’s clear we’ve reached a flashpoint in the world’s transition away from sole reliance on traditional HTTP-based unidirectional streaming, notwithstanding the myriad efforts underway in that domain to lower latencies from double-digit to single-digit multi-second levels. The closer real-time streaming gets to cost parity with conventional streaming, the easier it is for entities of every stripe to make this transition.

Ant Media

For example, we note Ant Media, a veteran supporter of DIY WebRTC-based streaming, has indicated it plans to introduce a managed cloud service that touts pay-as-you-go pricing. To the best of our knowledge, Ant’s plans don’t include cost reductions analogous to what we’re offering through our Pay-as-You-Grow plan and the cost-reduced Growth and Enterprise plans, but the Ant pay-as-you-go strategy is similar to Red5’s, albeit with reliance on a different approach as enabled through AWS policies.

Nanocosmos

We also understand that nanocosmos, whose global CDN is designed to accommodate unidirectional real-time streaming with end-user bases topping out at one or two hundred thousand, has brought its version of pay-as-you-go pricing into play through custom deals with certain customers. As in the case of Ant Media pricing, users will find that, otherwise, nanocosmos charges much higher rates with nowhere near the functionality as compared to Red5 Cloud.

Avoiding Misleading Claims

But as these strategies point to a general movement toward lower real-time streaming costs, buyers need to be alert to misleading claims. While, inevitably, they’ll discover the truth when they go from kicking the tires to negotiating real engagements, time is money, so why waste it on disappointing results.

Agora’s 10,000 free minutes 

A case in point is Agora’s claim that its managed real-time streaming platform is available free of charge on an ongoing monthly basis at or below 10,000 minutes of usage. Sounds great, until you dig deeper and discover how those minutes are calculated.

Agora’s claim of 10,000 free minutes.

In Agora’s words, the “10,000 free minutes are shared across multiple Agora products.” Agora says it “deducts those minutes” sequentially by product categories, starting with minutes used to “broadcast streaming audio minutes.” Then come minutes used for voice calls, followed by on-premise recordings of audio minutes, cloud recording audio non-transcoding minutes, cloud recording audio minutes, web page recording audio minutes, and cloud proxy audio minutes.

A catch in the terms of Agora’s 10,000 free minutes offer.

If at that point you still haven’t hit 10,000 minutes, the count moves to broadcast streaming HD video minutes. Then the free-minute deductions continue to usage involving other Agora product categories, including “broadcast streaming full HD video minutes,” which, btw, commands a higher usage cost for 1080p HD than 720p HD once the free minutes are consumed.

Agora’s pricing

In other words, what you get is nothing like what it sounds like as you drain the usage count product by product. To cite a simple example, if you consume 10,000 minutes with A/V streaming, the audio portion is free, but you pay for the video component at the higher rates set for that product category.

Market Leading Cost/Benefit Results with no Gimmicks

That’s a ridiculously far cry from the simple cost calculations that go into charging for operations on the Red5 Cloud SaaS platform. 50 free GB means what it says: 50 free GB of A/V streaming as delivered from original sources, regardless of resolution and whether anything else in the way of ancillary text and graphics is included in those streams.

Free live streaming platform for developers with no gimmicks.

This simple approach applies as well to how we calculate charges beyond the free count on the Pay-as-You-Grow plan and in the case of costs incurred with the Growth and Enterprise plans. Basic streaming prices are based on bandwidth consumed in and out and resource usage as measured in instance minutes with transcoding, Live Mixer and Stream Manager API benefits included at no additional costs. That’s it.

The upshot of the new Red5 Cloud pricing structure is we’re eliminating the lower-cost rationale people have long used for continued use of conventional high-latency streaming when there’s so much to be gained going to XDN-based streaming. Our case is especially cogent when one considers what can be done without having to pay DIY time and staffing costs for getting real-time streaming infrastructure up and running.

There’s no upfront startup fee beyond the basic monthly price set with the Growth plan or as negotiated with Enterprise plan engagement. The customer simply registers expected parameters respecting the number of streams to be ingested and their bitrates, the destinations to be served, the scale of the receiving population, the number of receivers who will be generating video, and some other basic details on the Red5 Cloud user portal and, within minutes, their dedicated XDN infrastructure is ready for use.

Unequaled Performance and Application Versatility

What can be done from that point onward at exceptionally low costs is nothing short of extraordinary by conventional streaming standards and by the norms of the real-time streaming market as well. This starts with the unlimited scaling and usage flexibility enabled by XDN Architecture.

Each customer’s streaming infrastructure leverages the XDN Architecture’s Stream Manager to orchestrate a hierarchy of Origin, Relay (if needed) and Edge Nodes for their use on the OCI servers reserved for Red5 Cloud, adjustments to which can be implemented on the customer’s dashboard in response to expanded or reduced capacity requirements at any moment over the engagement life cycle. In addition, servers in all node locations can be orchestrated by the Stream Manager software to provide support for Origin, Relay or Edge Node functionalities, which enables the multidirectional flexibility that allows any end point to be a receiver or originator of stream flows.

Cluster-wide redundancy ensuring fail-safe operations across all customer nodes utilizes the Stream Manager’s autoscaling mechanisms executed by platform controllers through OCI’s API. With comprehensive performance monitoring, the Stream Manager executes the load balancing essential to persistent high performance across the entire infrastructure without manual intervention. And in the event of a malfunctioning node component, it can instantly shift processing to another appliance in that node.

Along with the aforementioned support for transcoding and Live Mixer technology, which frame-accurately synchronizes and composites any number of streams from separate sources into a single stream, Red5 Cloud’s versatility is greatly enhanced by customers’ unlimited access to the Stream Manager API. Among other things, this brings into play our wide array of TrueTime application toolsets.

These are designed to support rapid implementations of applications like multiviewing options encompassing any number of video streams; real-time collaboration on remotely dispersed live production workflows; highly scalable watch parties; synchronized use of data overlays for personalized user experiences; video meetings involving any number of attendees, and a transformative approach to real-time surveillance encompassing compilations and analysis of unlimited volumes of camera feeds at region-wide scales.

Other aspects to the unique range of capabilities available to Red5 Cloud customers include uses of our patented server-side ad insertion (SSAI) technology to support not only interstitial placements of ads but also in-stream insertions of other A/V content and invisible forensic watermarks. And Red5 Cloud supports ingestions of source content transported over Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) and Zixi Software-Defined Video Protocol (SVDP) as well as the more commonly supported HLS, RTSP, RTMP and MPEG-TS protocols used with ingestion in real-time streaming.

There’s also support for recording, comprehensive encryption and authentication, frame-accurate metadata syncing; the list goes on, as can be seen on our website.

Conclusion

Growing vendor support for lower real-time streaming costs is abetting market awareness that old assumptions about cost disparities with conventional streaming no longer apply. In the vanguard of this trend, Red5 has set a standard in managed service functionality and cost efficiency that bodes well for the world’s transition to life in the next-generation video space.

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