How does Lightcast account for Bandwidth?

Lightcast is eager to make everything as easy and transparent for our clients as possible. Business-Life is complicated enough, isn't it? That's why we account bandwith in Video Minutes (="Viewing Minutes") for LIVE and Video on Demand streaming. The reason is as simple as the process itself:

1. It's more transparent.
2. It's easier to monitor.
3. It gives you full control and simply makes more sense than abstract numbers of "Gigabytes" transferred.

After all - your viewers are humans who watch your streaming content and not just mere computers who consume x-amount of bits and bytes of data.

How does it work?
It works like a cell phone plan: with your Lightcast Service Package you have a bandwidth-plan which credits a certain amount of Video Minutes each month. Each viewed minute is being deducted from your balance - just like with cell phone plans. In general you can compare the minute accounting to most "family cell phone plans" of the major carriers (such as AT&T, Verizon or t-mobile): you have a "family minute account" which all devices (your different VOD and LIVE Channels) pull used minutes from. The monthly package minutes will be credited to your video minutes balance within 24 hours upon each successful monthly (or annual) payment of your service package.

As a service to our clients we send out low Video Minutes balance alerts to your account email address to notify about the current status of your balance. This helps you stay informed in case you are not logging in to your Lightcast account frequently.

We have different packages with certain bandwidth plans included and we make it easy for clients to upgrade or add additional minutes as their audiences grow.

How can I purchase more Video Minutes?
Log in to your Lightcast Account and go to your "Control Center". Within your "Video Control Center" on the right side underneath the Video Minutes Bar you can choose your package of Video Minutes. Click on "Buy Video Minutes" and you will be linked to the payment page. Any Video Minutes you credit your account with are eternal - they never "flush out", they never expire - and serve as a safety net for any unexpected overage (through the spiking of viewership during a certain live event, or the viral distribution of an on-demand video for instance).
If you would like to know more about Lightcast's streaming and video hosting services please contact "Lightcast Care" customer support via contact form on www.lightcast.com at any time. We are looking forward hearing about your upcoming projects!

Your "Lightcast Care" Team!