Bandwidth from a company like Alpha Red works out to about 3 cents/gigabyte if you buy it in 50 megabit per second chunks, or 6 cents/gigabyte if you buy it in 4tb per month chunks.
S3 is 18 cents/gigabyte.
Megabit per second is cheaper if you can keep it at 50% utilization, so baseline bandwidth is actually quite cheap. You'd be crazy to be that bandwidth intensive and pay 18 cents/gig for all your traffic. It adds up quickly.
I'm not saying it qualifies as a CDN - I'm pretty sure it wouldn't - just that it's more complex than simply putting stuff up on S3, and based on the info in the article, the above is my guess as to what they're doing. You don't get 1/4 of a penny per hour of flv by building a worldwide network of servers.
Well, perhaps if you were as big as Google you could. I don't know enough about the economics of scale. But you'd have to be doing some serious volume at the local internet exchanges.
By the way, I was kind of thinking out loud because I'm in the same position:
Bandwidth is averaging above 1mb per person (and growing - the new games are bigger than Stunt Pilot and people play more the more we have), which is probably quite a bit less than justin.tv, but still costly. I definitely won't leave the US for bandwidth, but I'll probably end up with a mixture of baseline servers, gigabyte per month servers and a mirror of static content ready on S3 (as well as a static version of the site), just in case too many of my servers go down at once or we get a massive traffic spike.
Maybe then I'll get a story on TC about how I've created a "CDN", and hey, I wouldn't email them saying remove the story, it's innaccurate. :)
Bandwidth from a company like Alpha Red works out to about 3 cents/gigabyte if you buy it in 50 megabit per second chunks, or 6 cents/gigabyte if you buy it in 4tb per month chunks.
S3 is 18 cents/gigabyte.
Megabit per second is cheaper if you can keep it at 50% utilization, so baseline bandwidth is actually quite cheap. You'd be crazy to be that bandwidth intensive and pay 18 cents/gig for all your traffic. It adds up quickly.