LVB Billing

What are the billable items in LVB? How can I know what fees I need to pay?

The billable items of LVB include basic and value-added billable items.

• Basic fees: traffic/bandwidth fees, i.e., the fees for downstream traffic/bandwidth generated by connecting users to acceleration origin servers; in other words, traffic/bandwidth fees will be incurred as long as your live streaming content is watched.

  Note：

  You can choose bill-by-traffic or bill-by-bandwidth. For details prices, please see Traffic and Bandwidth. For more information on how to switch the billing method, please see Billing Method Change.

• Value-added service fees: fees of transcoding, recording, screencapturing, and porn detection. These four features are disabled by default. If they are enabled and used, fees will be incurred. For more information on prices, please see Billing Details.

How can I know whether my account is in arrears?

You can log in to the LVB Console and click Fees at the top right to enter the fees overview page. If your available balance is below $0, your account is in arrears. To continue using LVB and other services, you need to top up your account in time.

Is upstream push charged?

No. Traffic fees are charged only for downstream push.

When will value-added services be charged?

If you enabled value-added services such as recording, watermark, screencapturing and porn detection and have bound them with the push domain name. Such services will be billed once the push starts. For value-added services such as transcoding which are bound with the domain name, the billing will start when the pull begins. After you created a transcoding template and bound it with the domain name, no transcoding fee will be incurred if you don't start pulling. On-cloud stream mixing will be billed once a stream mixing task starts. When you enabled LVB watermark or on-cloud stream mixing feature, standard transcoding fees may be incurred, which is based on the resolutions of output live streams.

Transcoding Billing

How is LVB transcoding billed? How do I estimate the fees?

LVB transcoding is billed on the basis of the actually used codec, transcoding resolution, and transcoding duration. As stream mixing and watermarking are processed by the transcoding module, transcoding fees will also incur. For more information, please see LVB Transcoding.
Transcoding will not be charged on an aggregate basis if the same live stream with the same bitrate is watched by multiple viewers.

Why is a transcoding bill generated even though I didn't use LVB transcoding?

LVB transcoding includes LVB real-time transcoding, on-cloud stream mix, and watermarking. If you use the other two features, transcoding fees will also be incurred.

Does LVB stream mix always incur transcoding fees?

Yes. Transcoding fees will be charged based on the live stream output after stream mix. As transcoding resources will be consumed even if there is no playback after a stream mix task succeeds, transcoding fees for stream mix will be charged by the stream mix duration, which is different from the billing by playback duration for general transcoding.

Recording Billing

How is LVB recording billed?

LVB recording is billed by the peak number of concurrent recording channels in the current month, and the total number of recording channels in a statistical period is the concurrent channel peak. A single live stream recorded in one file format is counted as one recording channel. If you record in two formats (MP4 and HLS), they will be counted as two recording channels.

How is the LVB recording channel peak calculated?

When one live stream (one stream ID) is recorded in one file format, it will be counted as one LVB recording channel. The number of current recording channels is queried once every 5 minutes, and the maximum value of sample points in the current month will be used as the monthly recording channel peak for billing.
Sample:

Note：

• Yellow: recording task under stream ID A.
• Green: recording task under stream ID B.
• Blue: recording task under stream ID C.