Live Streaming Bandwidth Calculator – Know What You’ll Need

Streaming video eats bandwidth — but how much exactly?
If you’re broadcasting live to your audience, you’re not just sending video to the internet — you’re delivering it to every single viewer at once. The more people watching, the more data your server has to push out.

So how do you figure out the right amount of bandwidth?

It’s actually pretty simple.

📐 The Formula:

Bitrate × Viewers × Duration

Let’s break that down:

• Bitrate is how fast your stream is being uploaded, typically measured in Mbps. For instance, a 720p stream usually runs at around 1 Mbps.

• Viewers is the number of people connected to your stream at the same time.

• Duration refers to how long the broadcast lasts — in minutes or hours.

🧮 Example Calculation:

Say you stream at 1 Mbps,
You’ve got 50,000 viewers,
And your live stream lasts 120 minutes (2 hours).

Here’s how it looks:

Now convert that into gigabytes:

• Divide by 8 to convert megabits into megabytes

• Then divide by 1024 to get gigabytes

➡️ Result: ~732 GB of bandwidth used

⚠️ Why It Matters

When you run out of bandwidth or underestimate your needs, your viewers could face freezing, lag, or buffering — and that ruins the experience.

This calculator helps you plan ahead, estimate usage, and choose the right Red5Server streaming plan for your audience size and stream quality.