Here are a few important self-assessment questions for your business strategy and content managers, in order to assess your possible storage needs:
- How many files are we planning to upload each month, or within the next 12 months?
- What is the average duration of our videos?
- What is the average file size of our videos?
- Are we planning to delete files from our storage in order to free up storage, or will we need more storage in order to accommodate our increasing libraries once having used up our current storage?
Please keep in mind, that the storage used on the Lightcast CDN is about three times higher than the total file size of your uploaded files, due to the Premium Transcoding, which renders and stores up to twelve renditions of each uploaded video file, in order to ensure instant maximum device compatibility for multi-platform / OTT publishing.
Lightcast Advice:
Your Media Cloud allows you to either deactivate (unpublish) media items, or delete (erase) them. By deactivating to unpublish an item (Video or Audio File), you are keeping the file, and its associated metadata, image files, settings and statistics) in your Media Cloud for future republishing without the need to re-upload the file again, and in the process, use up transcoding again. At the same time, this means that your files remain stored in your Media Cloud while unpublished.
With the second option, to delete a media item (Video or Audio File), you are erasing it from your Media Cloud storage, and in the process, you are freeing up storage for new uploads. New uploads will still use new transcoding, but they can “re-use” your vacated storage from files you deleted. As a result, you will see the "Storage Bar” indicator on the Dashboard of your Media Cloud, increase after deleting files.
Please note, that it is not recommendable to delete Video or Audio Files if there is even the slightest chance that you may need them again in the future, may want to re-publish them to any publishing property (website, podcast, mobile app or TV app) at any point in the future, or if you want the safety of offsite backup storage of your files in the Media Cloud. The reason is simply, that you will use up transcoding again, should you re-upload the files again at a later point, possibly resulting in the need to buy additional transcoding. You should only delete files which you are 100% certain of never needing again, not as a backup to your local drives, nor for future publishing.