Mobile streaming video with Amazon CloudFront

Question

I support the video application for the client, and we just went through the process of porting a desktop site to Amazon S3 + CloudFront through the streaming distribution they offer. To be clear, I'm not talking about live streaming (which much of my Google is taking), and I'm not talking about Flash streaming.

We have a mobile site that currently uses Influxis. It's not very expensive, but we would like to consolidate on Amazon, given that they should be more stable than Influxis in the last few months.

I admit that although I am a little versed in Flash streaming, I am not 100% as fast as HTML video. Is this just a direct download or could it be a variable bitrate? Ideally, we would like it to scale for people with poor 3G connections.

Even if it’s “possible,” does Amazon support bandwidth scaling through load balancing? As far as I understand, its streaming distribution is useful only for Flash / RTMP.

If anyone has recommendations for good mobile streaming, I also welcome them.

Answer 1

Batch video (ie, “HLS”) - For iOS devices, delivered via HTTP. There is no easy way to provide this efficiently using the cloud interface.

Wowza Media Server supports dynamic HLS streams using SMIL playlists. We use WMS in our workflow - feel free to contact me if you want to do some testing!

We have some additional functions - for example, adding images to streams of only audio when the bandwidth of users is insufficient for the video resources of the stream.

Your question really speaks about iOS devices - although you say that RTSP mobile communication is required for delivery to Blackberries (although some of the latest sets support flash memory, for example, in a playbook).

The same goes for Android <= 2.1 - support for flash memory - so content is usually delivered using RTSP.

Unfortunately - RTSP does not support such smooth delivery - this is one bet - and this is it :)