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So you’ve spent years fine-tuning your streaming service operations - putting systems in place, spotting issues before they snowball, and building a well-oiled machine. And, as with any good optimization effort, this should bring with some benefits in terms of budgetary controls and savings.
But, what if you’re not seeing savings, but continuing to see your service costs grow and grow?
After working with countless customers over our 20+ years in OTT app development, we've seen this pattern come up over and over. At Accedo, there are a few red flags we always look for when we’re brought in to help optimize operations and rein in spend - and they might just be hiding in your service, too.
A surge in your content delivery network (CDN) expenses, sudden or gradual, is worth in-depth investigation. CDN costs should be scaled properly, and if not managed carefully, they can spiral out of control - you might find yourself spending five or six times more than before, with no clear understanding of how you got there.
Questions to ask:
Our advice:
Often, we see that basic CDN configuration reviews, and a better understanding of caching strategies, can yield very large cost savings. Do not be afraid to shop around for the best CDN for your use case.
Your overall cloud infrastructure can be another sneaky source of unexpected costs. Services like application firewalls, DNS, compute resources, and other cloud tools can rack up expenses fast — even if your service isn’t seeing a major uptick in users or experience rapid growth.
If your infrastructure isn’t scaled appropriately for your actual audience, you could end up overpaying. For instance, if your setup is built for 100,000 users but occasionally spikes to 500,000, you might face hefty overage charges from your cloud provider - especially if you haven’t pre-negotiated a plan to handle those kinds of peaks a few times per month.
At the same time, overprovisioning - spinning up more instances than you really need - can bloat your costs just as easily.
Questions to ask:
Our advice: Many companies over-provision cloud resources 'just in case.' It is best practice to regularly review and adjust your configurations, which will lead to significant savings. Consider using cloud provider cost explorers to understand where your money is going.
Technical debt, which refers to the implied cost of future rework due to quick but less-than-ideal development choices, is naturally a part of any software service. In small doses, it's manageable. But if left unchecked, it can quietly become a major drain on your budget.
It’s easy to fall into the mindset that if a service is still running, even on old infrastructure or outdated code, the maintenance costs must be minimal. But that doesn’t tell the full story.
What often gets overlooked is the added time and complexity required to make improvements or roll out new features on legacy systems. That inefficiency comes at a cost, both in terms of time-to-market and developer productivity.
The reality? Legacy systems tend to consume more resources over time, slowing down innovation and steadily inflating your operational expenses.
Questions to ask:
Our advice: While it might seem cost-effective to keep older systems running, the long-term costs of maintenance and lost development time can be substantial. Prioritize modernization projects to reduce technical debt and improve efficiency.
Outdated CI/CD practices and a fragmented toolset can significantly increase operational overhead. Tool sprawl, where multiple teams use different tools for similar tasks, leads to inefficiencies and increased costs.
Tool sprawl is pretty common in monitoring and observability, where one team will have one tool for infrastructure monitoring, such as AWS CloudWatch, and for APM another team may use New Relic or Data Dog. These tools have a lot of overlap and can give you an expensive picture of everything.
Questions to ask:
Our advice: Adopting modern DevOps practices, such as infrastructure as code and automated testing, can streamline operations and reduce costs. Regularly reviewing and consolidating your toolset can also lead to significant savings.
If your teams don't have a clear understanding of the costs associated with their work, you're operating in the dark. Ineffective cost management stems from a lack of transparency and accountability.
Questions to ask:
Our advice: Implementing cost dashboards and regular financial reviews can foster a culture of cost awareness. Ensure that teams understand how their actions contribute to the larger financial picture.
It’s important to be able to evaluate and look at your use of technologies, processes, and tools and determine what is useful for the here and now, and what is useful for the future. Avoiding cost growth in a service is hard to do, especially if those cost growth areas are not being actively considered.
By partnering with a trusted OTT observability expert like Accedo, you gain access to a holistic view and powerful lens through which you can streamline operational efficiencies and elevate your video service performance.
With detailed analytics on user engagement, service performance, and system health, our OTT solutions empower you to make data-driven decisions that optimize resource allocation, improve content delivery, and adapt to the evolving needs of your audience - all while keeping operational costs in check.
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