I've often wondered if CDNs are going to go out of business in the streaming world, and no longer be relevant, in the world of (rapidly) falling transit costs.<p>Once transit costs drop below $1/mbit @95th percentile (circa 2014 [1]), it's costing you $1 to transfer approx 300 gigabytes/month. At that point, the management costs associated with all of those distributed CDNs becomes greater than your transit costs. This is somewhat offset by continuously dropping prices of CDNS [2] which is as low as $0.02/Gigabyte on a 500 TByte commit.<p>What this does tell me is that NetFlix thinks they have an opportunity to save money on CDNs and can beat that $0.02/Gigabyte.<p>Bandwidth Delay Product(BDP) - keeps CDNs relevant for _downloads_ (iTunes, Software, etc..) - because everybody likes to max out their 100 mbit comcast connection, but you don't need much bandwidth to stream a show. Maybe some value for CDNs in HD or live event streaming.<p>[1] <a href="http://drpeering.net/AskDrPeering/blog/articles/Peering_vs_Transit___The_Business_Case_for_Peering.html" rel="nofollow">http://drpeering.net/AskDrPeering/blog/articles/Peering_vs_T...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2010/06/data-from-q1-shows-video-cdn-pricing-stabilizing-should-be-down-25-for-the-year.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/201...</a>