Image via
Wikipedia
In this edition of Living in the Cloud Series, I am going to discuss a way in
which video can be streamed using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront. We already have
services like Youtube and Vimeo for streaming video on Clouds. However, they are
more than streaming video and they also serve as social networks. For those who
want to have just the video streaming without the extra bells and whistles
offered by sites like Youtube, those who want to have complete control over
their video files than what sites like Youtube and Vimeo offers, those who want
to integrate the videos into their own personal or business sites without the
branding and/or ads on sites like Youtube, there is another option.
Users can upload their videos to S3, get the video encoded into FLV format,
serve using Amazon Cloudfront and embed it into public/private websites or blogs
or wiki. This will be particularly useful to business community who are worried
about having their brand on the video streaming website and videos. The solution
is Streamincloud.com.
It is an online service that helps you encode videos stored on Amazon S3 into
FLV format suitable for streaming. Their embed code can then be used in any
website to stream the video.
As it is customary in this series, I will list out the Pros and Cons of this
service.
Pros:
- Encodes videos at the bitrate of 512 Kbps and the same dimension as original
video. This offers a very decent quality video stream - Automatically keeps track of the bucket in S3 and encodes any video stored
in there to FLV format - Simple three step process: Create S3 bucket, Upload video to bucket and
embed video to websites - Since it uses Amazon Cloudfront, faster streaming at the end-user side is
achieved - Best of all this service is free for reasonable usage. High usage users can
contact them for custom encoding
Cons:
- Unlike Youtube, the streaming using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront will cost big
money - Even though ACL is used to give read/write permissions, I am still not 100%
convinced about the security - An unknown company and there is no guarantee for longevity
If you get kicks out of this sort of stuff then you’ll no doubt find my article on the subject interesting:
Towards a Flash free YouTube killer (was: Adobe Flash penetration more like 50%)
Cheers,
Sam
Good review. Although I wouldn’t be as concerned about security here as I would with other services that require your full Amazon details.
i’ve written up a piece about this on my blog