Streaming video to your website was a cool idea but has always been very expensive and so complex that you needed to have another company set it all up and run it for you. Well that has all changed today thanks to Amazon. If you are not familiar with streaming video vs progressive download, here is a little background.
Most video on the web is presented through what is called progressive download. That means that as the viewer watches the video, it continues to load. If it loads slower than it plays, the video stops to buffer and then continues when enough new video has downloaded.
When it comes to short videos, under 4 minutes this is typically the way to go. The files are generally small enough that they don’t cause much if any buffering (buffering is bad because research is showing that viewers leave your video when it buffers). It is also easy to set up, typically doesn’t add any new costs to your web hosting, and because your videos are not sensitive in nature you are not too worried about people having a copy of your video.
The other option is to use streaming video. This creates a situation where the viewer is only downloading that is on the screen and the rest is discarded. It also means that with a long video the view can move to any point along the timeline and start playing the video right there without waiting for the entire video to load. These are cool features and with longer videos means you are less likely to lose your viewers do to buffering and if they leave, they can come back and start the video where they left off.
The problem has always been high costs and extreme complexity. Basically it wasn’t worth it…until now. Amazon has added streaming to its CloudFront service. Amazon has been offering an inexpensive way to store files called S3 for years now. They then added CloudFront to make accessing those files for your viewers faster with CloudFront by delivering the videos through servers closest to the viewers geographic location.
Now, CloudFront is offering streaming for you video without ANY extra cost and they take care of the complexity. So if you would like to have your video streaming on your website, then Amazon S3 with CloudFront is the way to go. Check it out for yourself by Clicking Here.
Bye for now,
Brian
