If your PC sends its live feed directly to YouTube, you generally should not count cloud viewer-delivery egress as a cost you pay. YouTube receives the encoder’s ingest stream and transcodes it for viewers. Your PC’s electricity cost, by contrast, depends on its measured average power draw, how long it runs, and your local electricity rate.
Does YouTube charge you for egress when you stream directly from a PC?
In the usual setup, no cloud viewer-delivery egress charge is added to your bill just because your PC sends a stream over the internet to YouTube. Your encoder sends an ingest feed to YouTube; YouTube’s guidance says it transcodes that feed into formats for viewers. Your internet provider’s upload limits or data allowance may still matter, but that is separate from a cloud egress charge.
Cloud egress is relevant when you operate or pay for cloud services that send video out to viewers—for example, a cloud encoding, packaging, origin, or content-delivery stack. Amazon Web Services’ published live-streaming example models viewer distribution through CloudFront. That is a different architecture from a PC sending ingest directly to YouTube, not a bill estimate for the direct-to-YouTube setup.
How much does a 24/7 PC stream cost in electricity?
Use the PC’s average wall draw, the hours it runs, and your marginal electricity price:
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Electricity cost = average watts ÷ 1,000 × operating hours × price per kWh
For an illustration—not a measured PC result—assume a 100 W average wall draw and uninterrupted operation for 365 days. That is 8,760 hours, or 876 kWh. At the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s 2025 average residential price of 17.30¢/kWh, the arithmetic gives about $151.55 for the year.
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Your own result can differ substantially. The EIA’s 2025 all-customer-category figures ranged from 8.20¢/kWh in North Dakota to 35.72¢/kWh in Hawaii; those state figures are not residential-only prices. Use the rate that applies to your location and bill rather than treating a U.S. average as your tariff.
Measure watts instead of guessing
There is no universal PC wattage for a streaming setup. Encoder load, CPU or GPU, other tasks, display and peripherals, and power-management settings all affect total draw. A plug-in electricity monitor or watt meter can help measure the computer’s wall draw during the workload you actually plan to run. Measure over a representative period, then use the average reading in the formula; do not infer watts from the stream’s bitrate.
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How much data does a 24/7 stream send?
A useful decimal estimate for data sent is:
GB ≈ bitrate in Mbps × 0.45 × operating hours
For a full 365 days, that is approximately bitrate in Mbps × 10,800 GB, or 10.8 TB per Mbps of constant bitrate per year. For example, a constant 6 Mbps feed sends about 64.8 TB in a year; a 14 Mbps feed sends about 151.2 TB. These are calculated amounts sent to YouTube before protocol overhead or downtime—not cloud egress charges for viewer delivery.
Bitrate depends on the stream settings. YouTube’s current guidance for H.264 lists example recommended ingest bitrates of 8 Mbps for 720p at 60 fps, 14 Mbps for 1080p at 30 fps, and 17 Mbps for 1080p at 60 fps. Those figures help estimate data sent; they do not establish the PC’s power draw or create a cloud egress bill by themselves.
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When cloud egress belongs in the comparison
First identify where the stream is going and which service delivers it to viewers. If the PC sends directly to YouTube, compare electricity and any relevant internet-plan costs; do not add a cloud CDN bill that is not part of the setup. If you instead run cloud encoding, packaging, storage, an origin, or viewer delivery, include the applicable cloud charges and model the actual architecture.
AWS’s published example estimates a one-hour event with about 1,000 viewers at $69.74 total, of which $67.24 is modeled CloudFront distribution. The estimate assumes AWS encoding and packaging, stated bitrate and U.S. East pricing, and viewers consuming the highest bitrate. It illustrates how distribution can matter in that particular cloud-hosted architecture; it is not a universal AWS tariff or a cost estimate for a PC streaming directly to YouTube.
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A fair way to compare costs
- Define the architecture. Separate direct PC-to-YouTube ingest from a creator-operated cloud delivery stack.
- Choose one time period. Compare a month with a month or a year with a year, and use the actual hours the stream is expected to run.
- Measure PC wall draw. Use the average watts observed during the intended streaming workload, rather than a generic PC estimate or the video bitrate.
- Apply the local marginal electricity rate. Multiply kWh by the applicable price per kWh; use a local bill or tariff, not an unrelated regional average.
- Estimate upload volume separately. Use bitrate and uptime to estimate data sent, then check whether your internet provider’s upload allowance or policy makes that volume relevant.
- For cloud delivery, model actual services and traffic. Include the services used and the expected viewer traffic; do not apply a single example estimate to a different architecture.
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