Since YouTube hit the scene in 2005, we’ve seen a huge rise in the consumption of video on the Internet. We’ve seen Hulu and Netflix join the race; bringing the TV/movie experience to a slew of Internet-enabled devices (computers, iPhones, Xbox 360s, etc.).
In fact, Netflix is now primarily a digital video company. They delivery more videos on-demand through the Internet than they do DVDs.
All that to say video content online is a big deal. Viewers are beginning to watch more content online than traditional media such as DVD or Blu-ray. So if you’re interested in improving the quality of your video experience for users, Amazon CloudFront provides a service worth checking out!
Here are some things Amazon CloudFront brings to the table that sites like YouTube or Vimeo can’t compete with.
1. Ability to do Simulated Live Services for Online Church
A simulated live service is one which is not isn’t happening live, but feels like it to the viewer. For example, if an event starts at 9 PM, but a viewer joins at 9:07 PM they will begin watching the video 7 minutes into the video. This ensures everyone viewing is in sync and watching the same portion of the service.
Online services at LifeChurch.tv and Elevation Church take advantage of simulated live services.
I’ll share in a future post how this can be done via Amazon CloudFront.
2. Let’s Users Seek Anywhere in the Video with Minimal Delay
YouTube supports this feature whereas video sharing sites such as Vimeo do not. Check out this pretty neat human animation video on Vimeo. If you try to skip somewhere close to the end of the video right off the bat, you’re out of luck. You have to sit and wait for the video to fully load before you can do that.
If you’re looking to increase user engagement in your videos, this is a must have. Otherwise, if the first few scenes of a video aren’t enticing enough, the user has no quick way to skip forward and check out the rest of the video.
Or, let’s say a viewer is watching one of your online sermons but has to close the browser. Without the ability to skip quickly to where they left off, chances are the viewer isn’t going to continue watching the rest of the sermon.
3. Content is Globally Distributed Ensuring the Highest Performance Possible
When you use Amazon CloudFront your video is automatically distributed to servers across the world.
If you host videos on your own servers it resides in only one location (e.g. Atlanta, GA). So someone viewing the video from China has to wait for the video to travel halfway across the world to view it. Using Amazon CloudFront will place the video in a location closer to China so that viewers in China view the video from a location much closer to them.
This minimizes buffering and load times for visitors; regardless of their geographical location. Nothing is more annoying than a constantly buffering video!
As the church becomes more global, ensuring our content is globally accessible becomes more critical.
4. Freedom to Customizable the Look & Feel of Your Video Player
Using Amazon CloudFront gives you the freedom to choose your own video player. That gives you plenty of great options including free players such as JW Player and Flowplayer.
Both these plays let you skin and customize the player to your hearts content.
5. Better Protection for Copyrighted Content
I’m sure this is less of an issue for the church. In general we’re all about giving stuff away. π
But there are some instances you need to make it harder for people to steal your videos. For example, if your church has created music videos or sessions from a conference.
If you upload to any of the typical video-sharing sites like YouTube or Vimeo, your videos are easily stolen due to the technology used to playback the videos. However, with Amazon CloudFront the videos are never loaded or downloaded to a viewers computer.
This makes it harder for the average user to steal your videos.
6. It’s Cheap
Typical most content delivery providers like Amazon CloudFront charge a set monthly fee for a specific allotment of storage and bandwidth. For those starting out, the base monthly price is typically too high to justify.
But the beauty of Amazon CloudFront is that they only charge you for what you use. Bandwidth is billed at only 15 cents per GB. To put this into perspective, let’s say you have a 30 minute sermon that’s 250 MB. You could watch that video for 260 hours and pay less than $20.
Most content delivery providers would charge you at least $100 (most even higher than that) for their base plan.
Final Thoughts
Can you think of any other benefits of Amazon CloudFront? Or how about the cons? Please let everyone know in the comments!
Read more about Amazon CloudFront.
Andre Barnes says
Good post Alex. I have been using Amazon Cloud Services for my church for a while now to back up digital assets.
Alex Tran says
Thanks Andre! Amazon’s fleet of web services have been helpful to our church as well.
Tony Alicea says
This looks really cool. I’m going to check this out now.
Alex Tran says
Let us know what you think!
Daniel Marston says
We used Amazon for a little but found it’s global reach and speed to be less than satisfactory. With datacenters only in USA, EU and Singapore we found we got unreliable speed especially here is Australia. We switched to using akamai for our important video and Youtube for our generic video. Akamai has the best CDN on the planet and we serve up to 600 Mbit/sec during our conferences and it handled it well. Youtube runs on googles cdn which i haven’t had a problem with and you can monetise popular content.
Alex Tran says
True. The quality of a content delivery network (CDN) like CloudFront depend on the location and distribution of their edge servers. I’ve found CloudFront’s distribution to be on par with most CDNs (i.e. mostly US/EU locations with a few in Asia).
I just checked and it looks like in addition to Singapore CloudFront has added Tokyo and Hong Kong to their Asia network.
Akamai is definitely the leader in the industry. But they are also ridiculously expensive. If you are as global as Hillsong is, it is probably worth the investment.
But CloudFront should be suitable for most churches.
One caveat also about YouTube is their 15 minute video limit. So that disqualifies them being used as a sermon archive. Otherwise, would love to take advantage of Google’s network! π
BenJPickett says
We use Amazon S3 for our backup and have been extremely satisfied with the service they have offered us thus far. One of the biggest pros that I can think of as an IS admin and lone ranger with a few years of handling several aspects of the industry for switching to Amazon is bill consolidation. I have been migrating my current employer this way for the past 6 months. We went from having 8 companies that we were paying for various computer services down to 3. This has simplified our billing, accounting, is costing us considerably less in services and has saved us in labor hours month over month.
Amazon offers an incredibly robust network and while it isn’t the best in all areas for something like CDN, I think that it may serve up enough competition through cost savings to turn the heat on for Akamai and some of the other leaders that we may see some more competitive pricing platforms in the near future. By Amazon expanding their services it’s simply a win-win for customers across all platforms offering more choice, competition and customization.
Alex Tran says
Good stuff Ben!
I don’t know what our church would do without S3. You won’t find a better archival solution than S3.
Jason Isaacs says
I would be very interested in the post about simulated live events with cloudfront. Our church just started using cloudfront for CDN and I’m still learning it.
Alex Tran says
Cool beans!
I’ll be working on that post in the next couple weeks. Keep checking back on ChurchCrunch for it’s magical appearance!
Barry Whitlow says
CF looks great *BUT* choosing the Security Credentials is confusing. WHAT do we need to choose for our church videos & images on CloudFront? Anyone know? -Thanks!
Alex Tran says
Hehe. Yeah, the permissions can definitely be confusing. I’m actually in the process of writing a post that goes through how to setup CloudFront for video.
But where in the setup of CloudFront are you at now?
In short, the process looks like this.
1. Create Amazon S3 bucket (for storage of your video).
2. Create CloudFront streaming distribution.
3. Configure your video player to grab the file from CloudFront.
When you upload a file via S3, you should set the permissions to “Make available to the public.”
Hope this helps. Look for my article in the week.
-Alex
Alex Tran says
Or after you’ve already uploaded a file you can right click on it and say “Make Public” within the S3 AWS Console.
Barry Whitlow says
The email they sent after signing up said “You need Access Identifiers to make valid web service requests…” Pretty sure this pastor has never said the words “access identifiers’ π and then once there it asked me to pick ‘security credentials.’ I just want to stream a video using one of the free players you mentioned, not sell goods to other countries π *THANKS for the help!
Alex Tran says
Lol, that’s why I love diversity in the body of Christ. You don’t need to know how to do all that stuff. Leave it to us “access identifying, “security credentialing” techie people.
You function as God gifted you and we’ll function as God’s gifted us. π
Think you can wait about a week for my next post? It will walk you through step-by-step with screenshots on how to get this setup for the non-techie. π
Barry Whitlow says
Alex, no problem waiting a week and THANK YOU so much for helping me and other non-techie pastors understand and use some of the most powerful tools on the planet for our churches!
Alex Tran says
In case you missed it, the how-to was just posted today!
How to Setup and Embed Videos Using Amazon CloudFront.
Tim Peterson says
Did I miss the post how to use amazon cloud services for simulated live services? Just wondering if you can point me in that direction
Alex Tran says
Unfortunately I have not had the chance to write that article for ChurchCrunch, but I do have some code available that would be the basis of that article.
You can check it out here. Be sure you read the wiki for usage instructions.
That should at least give you a start and overview of how it can be done.
Bill Alpert says
Hi, stumbled upon this blog post while doing some research on video hosting.
As far as upcoming missed lessons, I can reschedule up to two in any 60 day period.
I’ve tried hosting on Amazon S3, but I don’t think cloud front was on my mindscape at that time.
I simply uploaded my video to an S3 bucket. Users complained of terrible performance. Wondering if using the cloud front system would help, and/or if additional preparation of the video file is needed prior to upload?
Seems like Wistia/Vimeo offer great performance, and somehow massage my files to improve results. I’m guessing that comes at a cost.