Reduce Streaming Bandwidth Costs

Why this matters

CDN egress is billed by the byte; a 40% bitrate cut on every stream is a 40% cut on egress. For popular titles that is real money every month.

The rollout needs per-title measurement — encode a sample, measure bitrate at the same quality score, and project the savings before touching the catalog.

How it works

Encode a representative sample with codec=hevc at your quality target, read the bitrate reports, then batch the library and monitor the CDN bill.

Submit a job with an input URL (S3, GCS or HTTPS), poll the job URL, and download the rendered output. No GPU, no queues, no ffmpeg builds to babysit.

Code

import requests, time

API = "https://api.mlslabs.io/v1/encode/jobs"
headers = {"X-API-Key": "YOUR_API_KEY"}
payload = {"input": "s3://bucket/library/", "codec": "hevc", "crf": 26, "pattern": "*.mp4"}

resp = requests.post(API, json=payload, headers=headers)
job = resp.json()
while job["status"] not in ("succeeded", "failed"):
    time.sleep(3)
    job = requests.get(job["url"], headers=headers).json()

print("Output:", job["output_url"])

Pro tips

• Measure on your top-20 titles first — savings are proportional to play counts.
• Account for the HEVC patent license fee in the ROI math.
• Keep an H.264 fallback rung for legacy players; stream HEVC to capable devices.

Model the HEVC rollout in Postman.