FlashComGuru.com - The Original Flash Video, Flash Media Server and Flash Platform Resource: Amazon Offers FMS Powered CloudFront Streaming

Amazon Offers FMS Powered CloudFront Streaming

Posted At : December 16, 2009 9:01 AM | Posted By : Stefan Richter | Related Categories: FMS

I'm a little surprised that I had to pick this info out of an Amazon email newsletter as this seems to be pretty major news to me. What is Adobe's PR department doing to not send me some up-front info on this?

Anyways, Amazon Web Services is now offering a CloudFront based streaming service (supporting audio and video) that is powered by Flash Media Server. What this means is that everyone can now have an on-demand, highly available and highly scalable audio and video streaming CDN at their finger tips. How does this differ from traditional CDNs? The main difference is that you are only charged for actual usage, there are no tie-ins or long term contracts as is the case with most (if not all) of Amazon's Web Service offerings. Depending on Edge Server location the fees start at around $0.17 per GB of transfer up to the first 10TB used, then decrease as data usage rises.

What is interesting from a Flash developer's point of view is that Amazon's streaming server of choice which has been rolled out on a massive scale here is Flash Media Server. It should be noted that this service can only be used for on demand and live streaming, so allows no server side code or RTC based apps which include any server side logic.
You can find more info here.

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Streaming Video with Amazon Cloudfront (February 25, 2010)

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I heard about this a couple of weeks ago, sounds massive but it's a shame we cant add our own ssas logic.

# Posted By Doug | 12/16/09 9:25 AM

About bloody time. Wowza was taking the lead there for a while :)

# Posted By Biffer | 12/16/09 9:42 AM

To be fair, Wowza was/is offering EC2 instances (basically single VMs). That's very different from CloudFront streaming which is more like a huge CDN.

# Posted By Stefan Richter | 12/16/09 9:57 AM

I've been playing around with the Goggle cloud and <angular/>, and I find myself dumbfounded that I know more about and actually use a Google cloud more than one with FMS. Since no one at Adobe bothered to tell any of us who actually have a business model where FMS is used and a CDN such as that as offered by Amazon is available. Google wisely provides a sliding scale with their cloud where the first level is FREE. Wouldn't that be nice for a cloud with FMS from Amazon or anyone else?

If you want to experience a free cloud, check out:

www.getangular.com

The only thing that Adobe has in a cloud is its head.

# Posted By Bill Sanders | 12/16/09 11:41 AM

Does this mean that one can also stream h264 video to the iphone through this service?

# Posted By Roger Form | 12/16/09 1:22 PM

To the iPhone? I doubt it as it does not support Flash or RTMP.

# Posted By Stefan Richter | 12/16/09 1:32 PM

There are various highwinds resellers that have offered pay as you go cdn rtmp streaming for quite a while e.g simplecdn, softlayer, vps.net etc
I think they're all wowza driven though.

# Posted By Mike Duguid | 12/16/09 5:30 PM

Stefan, I think that you got the Live streaming wrong. As I read it, they will offer it sometime in 2010. No?

# Posted By Jakob Hyldahl | 12/16/09 6:47 PM

Correct, I assumed it supported live but does not yet.

# Posted By Stefan Richter | 12/16/09 7:21 PM

Yes, double checked again. " Amazon CloudFront streaming currently supports on-demand media. Support for live events is planned for 2010. "

Worth waiting for most likely.

# Posted By Jakob Hyldahl | 12/16/09 7:39 PM

Mike -- You're correct -- pay as you go streaming is available through several Highwinds resellers, though the platform is completely FMS 3.5 based.

# Posted By Chris Bray | 12/17/09 3:20 AM

You can stream to Flash, iPhone, Silverlight and a number of other clients with Wowza Media Server 2 for Amazon EC2 - both live and on-demand streaming & server-side apps are supported. We just released it on Wed this week after an extensive beta - the details are at http://www.wowzamedia.com/ec2.html. More details about this release are at http://www.wowzamedia.com/2009-12-17.html.

Alex (the Wowza guy)

# Posted By Alex Dobrushin | 12/18/09 3:42 PM

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