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720p or 480p would be more realistic; the bandwidth costs for serving 1080p would chew through that $5 pretty quickly. (Assuming reasonable video bitrates) Besides, a very large chunk of consumers own machines that cannot handle 1080p.

Before you scream bloody murder, remember DVDs are only 480p.



CrunchyRoll offers unlimited 1080p streaming for a $7 monthly subscription.


Let's assume that a 1080p movie encoded for streaming using H.264 ends up at 8GB (a generous overestimate for most movies). At entry-level datacenter pricing of $0.10/GB, bandwidth costs will leave $4.20 for the rest of the supply chain.


$0.10/GB is way more than market rates for bandwidth. Dedicated server hosters such as 100TB.com charge about $200 for 100TB, ie. $2/TB or 0.2 cents /GB, resulting in a grand total of 1.6 cents for a 8GB movie stream.


For 5~6€, Zune on XBox 360 streams movies at 1080p while iTunes/Apple TV streams 720p and soon 1080p (or is that the case already?).




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