Monday, February 4, 2008

Amazon EC2 Flash Video Streaming

The ability to host web video clips in the Cloud is getting near with the release of the Wowza Pro media server for Amazon EC2 (beta).

Wowza Media Server Pro Unlimited is a high-performance, extensible and a fully interactive, Flash media server for live and on-demand flv streaming, chat and recording.

Wowza Media Systems has teamed with Amazon Web Services to make billing quick, easy, and secure for the combination of Wowza Media Server Pro, machine time with various EC2 instances and bandwidth.

Pricing of Wowza Pro Unlimited for Amazon EC2 is:
  • Instances
    • $0.14 per Small Instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed)
    • $0.45 per Large Instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed)
    • $0.88 per Extra-Large instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed)
  • Data Transfer
    • $0.12 per GB of data transfer in
    • $0.20 per GB of data transfer out
  • Monthly Charge
    • $5.00 recurring monthly charge
This pricing includes all charges for the use of Wowza Pro instances on Amazon EC2 (both Wowza Pro licensing and Amazon EC2 fees).

It is still in beta so improvements might be expected related to
  • performance
  • load-balancing
  • using Amazon S3 for hosting videos
  • management
Streaming video using Amazon EC2 and S3 is a great utility computing and storage application. It could help startups with limited resources to compete with youtube and other video hosting services. Check out the user guide and the forum to learn more.

Recommended books on Flash Video Streaming:

2 comments:

Daniel Lynton said...

The Wowza ec2 instance is great! Very easy to configure for running multiple servers. Very scalable if you need to do a big live streaming event and you need to double or triple your capacity overnight.

You may want to check out http://www.streamincloud.com - they will encode all the videos in a bucket to FLV for free. It's a nice little free service.

Unknown said...

FYI: a new Wowza Pro for EC2 User's Guide was recently posted on the Wowza website-- now with instructions for using ElasticFox in your browser to aid with AMI administration tasks.

Also new: Wowza 2 Advanced AMIs are now available which support delivering your H.264/AAC streams (live or VOD) from EC2 to your iPhone & to Silverlight.

John [at] WowzaMedia {dotcom}