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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