Using AWS to create your own VOD site

A recent post at Read/Write Web discusses how Zak Forsman used WordPress and Amazon’s Web Services to create a video-on-demand service: Cinefist.tv. From the post:

Forsman used WordPress to create a site where the videos could be viewed. He opted for the premium video-base themes developed by Press75.com.

He then needed a streaming server. Most services cost about 99 cents per gigabyte. He opted for CloudFront the streaming media service from Amazon Web Services that costs 15 cents per gigabyte. Forsman writes that a feature-length stream is in the neighborhood of 1 to 2 gigabytes. The decision to go with CloudFront was in his words, “a no brainer.”

The post also discusses some of the tools Forsman used, such as S3Fox.

We’re fans of Amazon’s Simple Storage and CloudFront services, having used them to serve video and static assets for YellaFella.com and Meet Me In the Future.

Amazon’s storage and content delivery is a relatively low-cost way to store and serve large files. Using a content-delivery network also provides faster site loading times for end users, and frees up server resources for processing code and making database calls.