[Khron]

    I haven't had a computer for a while, missed a few episodes, but I can't say I like this new format you're hosting in.  I can't see the cards when they're pulled up on the screen because there's no maximize button, and even if there were, the video has lost a ton of quality and the picture would be pixelated.  Hosting streaming wmvs was a much better choice for quality, not sure if it just cost too much, but I think you should go back to it.

[Trick]

I only do FLVs for the preview card episodes to try and save a bit on bandwidth. We should have an MP4 and WMV up in the coming week.

-- Trick

[Hexatomb]

Coincidence... 
I work for a company that deals in streaming files on the internet. The windows format is actually cheaper because you do not have to pay royalty fees to Microsoft. FLA, mp3, and mp4(Quicktime) all run off of the Flash Media Server created by Adobe. While this is an optimal platform, and one more widely used, it costs a little more due to having to pay Adobe the royalty fees.

Now on to file quality:
The quality of a movie dictates how large of a file it will be. Mananation is most likely not using a CDN (content delivery network) such as Akamai, Limelight, Level 3, etc... and so hosts files on their own server. This causes a large amount of bandwidth and bandwidth is what makes the internet expensive. I can't presume to say I know how many views of each video Trick and Lee get. But the average episode is at least 15 minutes. At the size they have been running lately, that's about 38megs. The "High Def" versions in wma and mp4 were about 300mb/175mb respectively. High Definition video is obviously much larger, and thus more expensive. Back to the topic at hand; let's say the new episode gets watched 30,000 times. Thats 30000x35= 1050000 or roughly a terabyte of bandwidth. At the current price for bandwidth ($4-12/mb), that's a lot of money. There's ways to cut the costs, and many different pricing options 95/5 and GB, but these are complicated and require more math than I'm willing to get into right now.

Personal Hosting
Assuming they are doing this on their own using a bit of website magic and a host that offers "unlimited" bandwidth, they may be running this much cheaper. A little bit of dnsMagic reveals site5.com which offers a low cost package and

Bandwidth 12 GB UNLIMITED

While I am always hesitant when I see "Unlimited", they seem to allow it as long as they don't exceed certain limitations. In the event they are not using the Basic Plan, then they have a Bandwidth limit. Bandwidth is the big killer for any website.

[Trick]

Site5 is indeed unlimited now, our deal with them is not unlimited though we haven't hit the upper limit yet so I haven't bugged them about upgrading to unlimited.

The other thing to note is that 30,000 downloads is a bit high of an estimate but thanks for the boost of confidence We're working on getting our name out there.

I've explored the CDNs out there, BitGalaxy and others but we're in a grey zone below the need for a CDN and above what a single box can reasonably be expected to do. So we make do.

[Hexatomb]

Come on Trick, Up-Sale yourself! 50k!

[Trick]

Oh I'm working on it.