Amazon S3 for Video Hosting

In an earlier post I have written that the next YouTube could be built on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) by two guys in a dorm for roughly $0. It is indeed very easy to host videos on Amazon S3.

All you need to do is to sign up for an Amazon S3 account and upload your videos with the Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer (available here: S3Fox). To see this in action check out this interesting Amazon S3 video hosting tutorial by Perry Lawrence on YouTube.

You can simply include the hosted files in your web pages. However it is also possible to create nice web applications or mashups using the video content on S3. The book Amazon.com Mashups by Francis Shanahan will help developers to get familiar with Amazon Web Services. The examples in this book demonstrates how to integrate AWS with APIs from Yahoo!, eBay, Google and YouTube. Check out this sample chapter on the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) available at Wrox.

It has never been easier to create your own YouTube!