US/UK Patents for innovative streaming service

We want to market a new kind of streaming software which allows for vastly efficient UAV-to-ground information transmission. We have independently developed the technology behind the software and we believe that none of the companies active in this field are using the same approach. Because of this we'd like to get a patent for the technology, but we have no idea what kind of investment of time and money that requires. We were looking into US and UK patents for now, and it seems like there is a lot more to invest than just the filing fees. Could you please tell us what the average costs of comparable patenting objectives are?