Wetlook World Forum

The bandwidth charges alone for my freesite amounted to over $1500 for last year. I too bought a new digital camera at the end of last year- nearly £3000 ($4500).

Add in the time, effort, clothes, and lots of other costs it turns out to be a labour of love.

Good luck with trying to get donations.

It looks like you are maybe coming round to the idea that "free material" doesn't actually exist, it costs money to produce it and supply it.

One further point. I think you have perhaps misunderstood the NTL set up. The 1Mbps connection is none symetrical and not balanced. The 1Mbps only applies to you downloading content- uploading is much slower.

If you are planning to serve video via your NTL connection to people then it will be done at the "upload" speed which I think is around 64 or 128kbps.

If several people are downloading at the same time the bandwidth will be divided between them. This will make the connection extremely slow. Offering the material free means you will get hundreds of people fighting for the material, the resulting line contention will virtually bring the thing to a halt. I  also think that you risk losing your NTL connection.

If you plan to serve your own video footage (I don't recommend it) then a telephone ADSL line would be better as they have a much faster upload speed.

Just for information, a leased line from BT offering balanced bandwidth for video serving costs £32,000 per year ($50,000) So it gives you a good idea of how expensive serving video is- particularly on a large scale.