Charge for FTP upload?

[Eric Christians]

Not to hi-jack this thread, but what do guys (& gals) charge for an ftp upload?

FTP uploading and downloading is being used more and more, especially for tv commercials, and my department is finding ourselves devoting more of our time during the work week to uploading and downloading spots. So I was curious what you all charge.

Do you charge just for uploading or both uploading and downloading?

Do you charge based on per item or per alloted megabyte?
(Like 0-100 Mbytes cost $XX.xx; 100-200Mbytes cost $XX.xx)

My sincere apologies if I hi-jacked this thread, but this post got me scratching my head this morning.

Thanks
Eric Christians
a.k.a. (KTTC-Redbeard)

[Chris Blair]

We have a couple of different ways we charge.

For previews that are just quick exports from a timeline, one encoding pass, then uploaded to our FTP for a client to view or emailed to them directly, we have a charge we call “digital file ouput.” We charge a flat $25 fee for this as long as the project is a reasonable length…meaning under 30 minutes. On most projects, we can end up outputting and uploading/emailing half a dozen to even a dozen of these for client review.

If this sounds high..consider how much a client would spend of their time, traveling to our place, sitting in on edits etc., watching previews etc. if we didn’t send them these? It would certainly cost more than the $150-$300 they pay to get a 512×384 video file delivered to them at their desk, to be able to watch at their convenience.

When we do final exports/encodes for the client’s use in their website, at presentations, trade shows etc., we charge differently because we spend more time processing and outputting the file. For that we charge:

$50 setup fee for up to 10 videos.
$35 encoding for each video to a specific format (30 minute maximum length)
$5 for each additional pixel size, bit-rate of the SAME format.
$2 for every additional minute over 30

So if we had 15 vignettes of client tesimonials (under 30 minutes each), and they wanted an H264 file of each and a windows media file of each, we’d charge two $50 fees for setup, and 30 fees of $35 for encoding to 2 separate formats.

If they wanted 15 videos encoded to 2 different sizes/bit rates of H264, we’d charge the same setup fees ($100), but charge 15 x $35 for the first H264, and 15 x $5 for the second set to the same format but different pixel size/bit rate.

Videos over 30 minutes get an extra $2 per minute over 15 added on. So a one-hour video would be a $50 setup, $35 encode, $60 for the additional 30 minutes. Total would be $145. Pretty reasonable in my book to get a one hour video encoded for the web or other use. If we have to capture video prior to encoding, we charge standard rates to capture it.

It might sound complicated, but doing good quality compression, (producing high-quality files at small sizes) is time consuming and almost always involves lots of testing prior to doing the final encode. We typically upload tests to our FTP and embed them in flash players to see how they’ll perform from a standard website for playback. We’ll test them on lots of different computer platforms of varying speed using various operating systems and browsers. If they look good and play back reliably in those tests, then we encode the batch.

It ends up working out to about $125-$175/hour for the work, which is what we need to generate most of the time to make money. When we get down to below $125 while using an edit suite or one of the stations that is fast enough to do encoding, then we have a hard time making a profit.

We’ve never had a client complain about these charges either…primarily because they’re about the same or less than what other video hosting companies charge for compression.

Could they get their compression done for less? Probably, but I can guarantee you people doing it for less wouldn’t be as thorough as we are, plus we often help their IT or web people get the videos up onto their sites. This is an important step because you’d die if you knew how often web designers and IT people take your “ready to use” web videos and recompress the crap out of them (often making them LARGER in size), because they think they have to to get them work in Flash or whatever other player they’re using.

Of course one thing that is beginning to put a kink into being able to charge these kinds of fees is hosting companies that don’t charge anything to compress your files for you. Of course you have to upload a high-quality digital file FIRST for them to compress…so even if clients used these companies, they still need an exported/encoded file from you first! One such company that does this is Bits on the Run. They do a great job, but I personally think they’re hurting the industry by not charging a dime for really high-quality compression. Companies like YouTube and Vimeo are different in that they’re social sites, Bits on the Run is strictly a commercial video hosting site that makes money by charging a hosting fee.

Hope that helps.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Grinner Hester]

I simply charge by the hour or bid flat prices for turn-key projects and work this stuff into that bid before hand. I don’t change my rate for doing different things. If I can’t go bill full rate because I’m booked… that’s at full rate.

[Mark Suszko]

Chris you really seem to have this worked out to a fine edge.

All I can add is; compare the costs of the FTP to physically dubbing and MAILING tapes or DVDs. Digibeta stock is not a trivial cost if you’re sending out a lot of them. FTP is faster and cheaper generally.

[Chip Onium]

In this day and age, the FTP service for larger businesses should be rolled up under the original contract, not set aside as an additional fee structure.

We were just quoted $500 setup fee with $50/mo charge for a file to upload that is only 1MB. It takes 2 mins to upload via their web browser, and we are looking to automate the process with FTP.

Not at this ludicrous rate. The painful process of logging in to their webpage, click on the upload file link, find your file to upload and then sit and wait for it to go through, then validate …. is annoying.

But $500 setup fee for someone to designate a user/directory on their systems and to monitor the files on a daily basis is a ripoff. These costs are/should be part of that business overhead structure. Period.

I’m thinking their host provider, if they are 3rd party is charging for their file uploads. Otherwise, I don’t think companies would really think twice about offering the convenience of file transfer to receive the data immediately. This is not 1995.