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How To Stream Video From Amazon S3

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:

Amazon S3 Service

Firefox S3Organizer Extension

S3 URL Protector

How to reduce the cost of GET requests

How to set up CloudFront

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