5 ways to reduce cloud costs for OTT streaming platforms

Your OTT platform isn’t burning money on ads. It’s burning it on video infrastructure.

If you’ve scaled past your first few thousand users, you’ve probably felt it: the cloud bill starts climbing faster than your subscriber count.

Not because your app is bloated. But because video infra is brutally expensive especially when you’re encoding every resolution, storing every rendition, delivering globally through CDNs, and spinning up compute for every live stream.

Media companies, sports streamers, and SaaS-backed OTT teams are all facing the same reality: runaway infra costs kill margins.

Most teams are overspending in places they don’t need to.

This guide breaks down 8 proven strategies to cut cloud costs across your video stack without hurting the experience you provide your audience. And we will also suggest how FastPix can help you with this

‍

1. Smarter encoding = Smaller bills

Encoding costs don’t scream. They bleed you quietly. Most OTT platforms still pre-encode every resolution for every device even for content that might never get watched. Multiply that by your full library and you’ve got a silent cloud bill killer.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Let’s break down four encoding strategies that directly reduce cloud spend without compromising quality:

Per-title encoding: Not every video needs the same bitrate ladder. A talking-head interview doesn’t need the same profile as a high-motion sports clip. Per-title encoding uses context-aware logic to optimize renditions based on the video’s actual complexity.
Fewer renditions. Same quality. Lower costs.

Modern codecs (HEVC, AV1): Legacy formats like H.264 are easy to deploy, but expensive to deliver at scale. Newer codecs like HEVC (H.265) or AV1 can reduce bandwidth usage by 30–50% especially valuable on mobile and smart TVs. Yes, the encoding step is heavier, but the downstream savings (CDN + storage) make up for it quickly.

Just-in-time (JIT) transcoding: Instead of pre-generating every possible rendition, transcode on demand especially for long-tail or low-traffic content. This means you only pay compute costs for renditions that actually get viewed. Perfect for archival libraries or episodic drops.

Bitrate ladder pruning: Use real playback analytics to remove unused renditions. If your 144p or 4K streams have near-zero traffic, don’t waste storage or compute on them. This alone can cut encoding and delivery costs significantly.

FastPix Tip: Our Just-In-Time encoder supports per-title encoding. No need to over-provision or manually manage bitrate ladders. Just call the API.

‍

2. Optimize storage without sacrificing access

Storage seems cheap until you realize you’re paying for every rendition, thumbnail, and archive version across your entire library. The solution isn’t deleting files, it’s tiering smarter. Keep newly uploaded or high-traffic videos in hot storage, and move older or long-tail content to cold tiers like Glacier or Deep Archive. Set up automated lifecycle rules to handle these transitions based on access patterns. For one-time events or seasonal content, archive aggressively after the peak window. And don’t forget to compress thumbnails and remove duplicate assets they quietly add up.

FastPix tip: Use our tagging and lifecycle APIs to auto-archive based on time, usage, or content type no manual sorting needed.

‍

3. CDN smarts to cut delivery spend

CDN costs often scale faster than your audience. Live streams, global reach, and multi-device playback all drive up egress and edge traffic bills, especially if your setup isn’t optimized. A multi-CDN strategy gives you control letting you steer traffic based on region, performance, or pricing. It also gives you leverage in cost negotiations. From there, tighten your edge caching game.  

Extend cache TTLs for popular assets, pre-warm caches before big events, and shape traffic to reduce origin fetches during spikes. Adding an origin shield layer helps consolidate cache misses to a single point, cutting down origin load and costs. Finally, minimize redundant delivery. Use signed URLs, tune your cache keys, and merge manifests where possible to avoid sending the same content multiple times under slightly different requests.

FastPix Tip: We support multi-CDN delivery, signed playback URLs, and real-time delivery metrics so you can track where waste happens and cut it at the edge.

‍

4. Monitor like a FinOps engineer

You can’t cut costs if you don’t know where the money is going.

Start by setting up real-time cost tracking using tools like AWS Cost Explorer or third-party options like Finout. These help you see which services are costing the most.

Make sure to tag all your resources, by project, team, or feature. So you can break down costs clearly. Without tags, everything just shows up as a blob.

Set budgets and alerts. That way, you’ll get notified if something suddenly gets expensive, like a CDN spike or an encoding job gone wrong.

And clean up regularly. Look for unused resources like idle VMs, unattached volumes, or old test environments. They add up fast.

FastPix Tip: We show cost and usage by project in the dashboard, so it’s easy to track what’s being used and where you can cut back.

‍

5. Smarter streaming strategies

Every extra rendition you store or deliver has a cost. And chances are, most of them aren’t even used.

Start by optimizing your bitrate ladders. Use playback data to see which resolutions people actually watch. If no one’s using 144p or 4K, cut them out.

Then go a step further with device-aware delivery. Don’t send a 1080p stream to a phone that can’t display it. Tailor the stream to match the device’s screen size and connection.

In low-bandwidth regions, serve lighter versions of your content. A lower-bitrate stream that loads reliably is better than HD that constantly buffers.

And instead of storing every format (HLS, DASH, CMAF), use dynamic packaging to generate them only when needed. Saves storage, reduces compute, and keeps your system lean.

FastPix Tip: Our player SDKs automatically adjust resolution delivery based on the device, screen, and connection, so you don’t waste bandwidth on unused quality.

‍

Final thoughts: Treat cost like a product problem

Every decision you make around encoding, storage, and delivery shapes your margins, your ability to scale, and your user experience.

The most resilient OTT platforms are built by teams that treat infrastructure like part of the product. They track it, optimize it, and build with cost-efficiency in mind, just like they would for performance or UX.

If you haven’t reviewed your video stack lately, now’s a good time. Audit your workflows. Revisit how you’re encoding and delivering video. And consider platforms like FastPix, which bakes cost optimization directly into the pipeline, from smart encoding and adaptive delivery to real-time analytics and usage-based pricing.