Amazon CloudFront Media Streaming Now Available [Amazon Web Services Adds Media Streaming to Its Content Delivery Service]

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Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company, has gone official with a new feature, streaming media delivery for Amazon CloudFront. That means that you can now choose to stream audio and video content to your devices from Amazon CloudFront instead of downloading the full media file.

That way you should enjoy your favorite shows almost immediately without having to wait for the full download. Amazon CloudFront will get all that content for you from a worldwide network of 14 edge locations which means you’ll experience low latencies and “cost-effective” deliveries. And just like all Amazon Web Services, the Amazon CloudFront only require minimum fees as you will pay for what you will actually use.

Tal Saraf, General Manager of Amazon CloudFront had this to say about the new service:

Many customers have told us that an on-demand streaming media service with low latency, high performance and reliability has been out of reach– it was technically complex and required sales negotiations and up-front commitments. We’re excited to add streaming functionality to Amazon CloudFront that is so easy, customers of any size can start streaming content in minutes.

As I said before, you only pay for what you use. In case you haven’t watched the whole movie or video, you will pay exactly for what you did watch, which is certainly a feature you will love.

So how does it all work exactly? What users will have to do is “simply store the original copy of their media objects in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and then enable those files for distribution in Amazon CloudFront.” That doesn’t sound too complicated especially when you’ll have tools like the AWS Management Console or the Amazon CloudFront API at your disposal. Once content streaming is requested, users will get the highest bit rate, lowest latency and highest quality stream possible.

Amazon CloudFront will use Adobe Flash Media Server 3.5.2 to stream content and users can expect live events for 2010.