This column acts as a detailed Q&A for how storage works over the DaCast system. Please Feel free to comment to see topics addressed here.

How much storage is included with my account?

This depends on your plan level. Please log into your DaCast account and click MY ACCOUNT and then STORAGE at the top to see how much included storage you have. If you are considering buying a plan, and not sure which to go with, please consult our pricing page.

How much is storage if I go over?

The answer to this varies. Monthly Plans and Event Plans are charged $0.15 a month for each GB of storage they go over their limit.

How often is extra storage billed?

If you are over your storage limit, extra storage is billed monthly. Event Plans, however, have to pre-buy their storage amount which will then be added to their plan.

What is the minimum charge for extra storage?

For monthly plans, there is no minimum and the charge for extra storage occurs on the same day as your plan rebill date. For Event Plans, you have to purchase extra storage in advance (i.e. 10 GB, 20 GB etc.) which then adds to your storage total for an amount of time you select.

When are Event Plan accounts billed for storage?

Event Plan accounts are billed manually, meaning you have to pay in advance for a set amount of time that can be 1 month, 3 months, 6 months or 12 months.

How do I purchase additional storage if I’m on an Event Plan account?

First, click STORAGE at the top and then click . This will bring you to the following screen:

Here you can select how much storage you want to buy and for how long. For example, you can buy 10 GB of storage for three months. This will cost you $4.5 (10 GB x 3 months x $0.15) and will increase your storage for those three months to 12 GB, 10 GB above the normal 2 GB of storage on Event Plans.

How is storage cost calculated?
Storage cost is calculated from the peak storage used each month for monthly plan. So deleting all videos just before the billing date, for example, will not bring the cost to 0.

Can I use PayPal to purchase additional storage?
No, only accounts with a credit card on file can purchase additional storage. If you have purchased an Event Plan or a Monthly Plan with PayPal, your account will be blocked from uploading video files that would take you over your storage limit. Furthermore, you will be presented with the following screen that you can use to change your purchase method to credit card if you want to qualify for additional storage:

 How does multi-bitrate work with storage?

All bitrates are added up and factored into the storage amount:

Do inactive files count toward my storage total?

Yes, all files on your account (up until they are deleted), regardless of if they are turned ON or OFF, count toward your storage total. If you are unclear what your total storage might be, please click STORAGE at the top of the screen after logging into your account.

If I cancel my monthly plan, what happens to my stored files?

If you cancel a monthly plan, and don’t purchase any “”Event Plan”” bandwidth, your files will be removed from your account.”

Found under DESCRIPTION, you can set a VOD file, live stream, package or playlist to off like so:

Doing so will make the video inaccessible and, if the content was monetized, will disable the paywall preventing future people from buying the content.

To make it clear, in the case of live channels, the stream will not automatically turn back on again once you start to stream though the encoder. You will have to go back into DESCRIPTION and manually turn it on again before this will happen. If you stream often and have a free stream, it’s recommended just to leave the channel on to make it easy to begin streaming again during your event or programming.

CDN is short for content delivery network. This is a network of servers that deliver a web page or web content, such as video, to a user. A CDN copies the web content to a network of servers that are dispersed at geographically different locations. When a user requests content that is part of a CDN, the CDN will redirect the request from the originating site’s server to a server in the CDN that is closest to the user and deliver the cached content. The closer the CDN server is to the user geographically, the faster the content will be delivered.

So using a CDN is ideal for streaming video, especially to a geographically diverse group of viewers.

Dacast uses Akamai, which has one of the largest network of servers in the world, ensuring scalable and high quality live streaming.

Under PUBLISH SETTINGS, there is a field called referrer.

This option talks about the ability to add website referral restrictions to your content. For example, if you own the website www.test.com, you can setup a referrer to block sites that aren’t test.com from trying to grab and reuse your embed code.

Here is a video to better explain how to set this feature up.

It stands for File Transfer Protocol, and deals with FTP clients like Filezilla as a way to upload content to your account. FTP clients are external programs which allow you to connect to a web service, like Dacast, using login details that include a:

server
username
password

This is the suggested method for uploading files around or over 1.5 GB in size. If you need help on using this feature over Dacast, please refer to this video tutorial.

Dacast recommends against using VP9.

In particular, if you plan to do All Device (HTML5) live streaming it is recommended to use the H.264 video codec instead.

Live streaming can be done with VP9, but has known playback issues over certain environments. Use it at your own risk.

For more information on VP9, it’s a proprietary compression format that was developed by On2Technologies in May 2003. It is also called the TrueMotion video codec. It is a ‘lossy’ video compression format. It is often used by JavaFX, Adobe Flash and Flash Video Files.