Hosting Videos With Amazon S3 & EZS3
By now I’m sure you have started to hear the buzz about using video. It’s true, video is more captivating and engaging than reading for our online world, where we want things quick and fast. Video is becoming one of the top methods for reaching your audience and building an audience. There are a ton of options when it comes to hosting videos, and I’d like to discuss one in particular, using Amazon Web Services and EZS3.
Amazon S3 Storage
Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a simple to use, cheap online storage service where you can store your video content. It costs absolutely nothing to sign up, the rates are very cheap, and you only pay for what you use, there are no commitments or monthly fees, only usage fees. This will take the load off your hosting provider who likely does not have the same bandwidth that Amazon has, which means faster loading videos, and a faster loading website.
Uploading content is very easy with a Firefox plugin call S3Fox, I’m sure there are many more, but this one was simple to use and has served me well. Google S3fox for more information, you will also find alternative options with that search.
Amazon Cloudfront
Amazon Cloudfront is a CDN (Content Delivery Network). This is used for copying your video content from Amazon S3 and storing it on servers spread throughout the world on what are called Edge Networks. These are servers where your video content will be downloaded from. This makes it much faster to have your content spread around the globe on local servers close to where your users will be viewing it from. This again is a pay per use service, there is no fee for signing up, and you only pay for what you use.
So this makes a great combination, you store your videos using Amazon S3, and the videos are distributed using Amazon Cloudfront. Next step is how do you turn those videos into something people can view on a web page, and that’s where EZS3 comes in.
EZS3
This is a web based service that you sign up for and there is a small fee, worth every penny. In no more than a couple minutes, you can have your video uploaded to Amazon S3, and a customizable Flash video player ready to post on your website. All being distributed through Amazon Cloudfront. It’s really that simple, all done online from their website. Their support has been great, I posted a question about being able to create ‘player templates’ and 2 hours later, my account had a new feature activated (as it was in beta) and they were asking for my feedback. I provided a few pointers and less than a day later, my suggestions are now part of the product. How is that for customer service and satisfaction. Anyone can record videos and have them uploaded and playing on a website in minutes, leveraging Amazon. This kind of Content Delivery Network infrastructure use to be for big corporations only (it was expensive!!), now it’s available to everyone and anyone and a reasonable price.
If you’re worried about costs, EZS3 even has a cost estimate feature for each video you post, telling you how much it will cost if you have 1000 people viewing that video each month. For example, I have a 19MB video file (roughly 5 minutes or so) that will cost me $3.27USD/month to have 1000 people view it.
EZS3 Features
- Stat Tracking
- Branding
- Skin selector
- Upload & Download videos from Amazon S3
- Manage Amazon Cloudfront Distributions
- Create/Delete folders & files
- Create wrappers for several different media formats such as Flash FLV Videos, Mp3 Audios, Windows Media Videos, Quicktime Movies, Adobe PDF Documents, and Camtasia Studio Productions.
- Add viral branding
- Create underlays to redirect people upon successful video completion
- Statistics tracking
- + more
Support Media Players Available
It really isn’t complicated at all, it’s cheap, it’s easy, and it’s FAST!! So head on over to EZS3 and get yourself an account, you won’t be disappointed (you will also need to sign up for Amazon S3 and Cloudfront, both free to sign up). They even have a 14-day trial available for $1.
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Filed Under: Howto
Hi Kevin,
thank you so much for this post on S3 and EzS3, it really answered a lot of my questions. I got here through the link in James’s Forum and it was well worth it. I am in the process of getting my camtasia video review on a new blog and my internet guru is unavailable. Now I want to do it myself and need every help I can get.
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Kevin Reply:
October 23rd, 2010 at 7:47 am
Hi Christine, glad I could help! I’m sure you can do it.
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Great post. I’m just getting into Video I’ve been doing some head miles over this and you have been a massive help?
Keep it coming you are onto a winner with this series of posts!!
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Kevin Reply:
November 12th, 2010 at 5:14 pm
Thanks Ian, glad you’ve found it useful, I have more planned!
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