How To Stream Video From Amazon S3
August 31, 2009 by Paul
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a great service for anyone doing business on the web that needs a lot of storage or bandwidth.
The problem with most web hosts is that they charge you every month for the maximum bandwidth you might need, whether you actually do need it or not.
Amazon S3, however, only charges you for what you use. That makes it ideal for streaming video (it’s not actually streaming, it’s progressive download, but we won’t get into that here).
You link to the video html page, the video itself from within a web page on your site, or link to it from within your web site video player. The actual video streams from Amazon S3 through your web site, but it doesn’t add to your web host bandwidth usage.
That way, if you start getting a lot of views of videos from your web site you don’t need to go running off and upgrade your web hosting plan. Amazon just charges you for the extra bandwidth at about 17 cents per Gigabyte.
I’ve created a video showing how to use the service to stream video. The link is below and opens in a new window because it’s too large to put here…
Streaming video from Amazon S3 tutorial video
There are some relevant links that are also below the video.
Related Links:
How to reduce the cost of GET requests
How to set up CloudFront.
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I always enjoy learning what other people think about Amazon Web Services and how they use them. Check out my very own tool CloudBerry Explorer that helps to
manage S3 on Windows . It is a freeware. http://cloudberrylab.com/
[...] add on to the basic Salesforce.com software. Amazon Web Services acts as an IaaS for storing data, streaming video and other options in the [...]
Paul, just a quick note, even though your url is hidden by the bill myers url protector your videos can still be accessed because you have changed the ACL to allow all viewers. That removes the privacy of your video on the AS3 account…
For example, if I know your amazon url, the location of your content and the name of the video I can download it.
I was able to glean all of that info from your video and access some of your members only videos.
I can tell that you are using WordPress and there is a really sweet plugin that was developed by a guy (who also developed a membership plugin for WordPress) that allows you to stream your videos with out changing the ACL. It also eliminates several steps from your process!
Check it out here!
http://S3MediaVault.com/
-Chris
@chrisegg