When the email arrived, I got giddy. My head spun and the world turned all the colors of the rainbow.
Amazon Web Services launch Cloudfront is a web based streaming and content delivery network that democratizes the whole game in a new and different way. As I read the teaser and visited the site, I thought back to my early days with Ken Rutkowski, on what was first TechTalk.com and now KenRadio.com. When we started a company called PlusMedia back in 1999, we were stymied by the costs for hosting and streaming, but to his credit, Ken found, and always has discovered ways around it. The more I read, the more I thought about companies like Intervu (who pioneered so much of the shuttling of content around the net) which was later acquired by Akamai.
What Cloudfront will do, is empower a whole new group of YouTube like services, but that offer more in the way of add-on services and flexibility to the streaming media content producer. Roll in a package of some of what Sorenson Media is up to (run by pal Peter Csathy) and companies like BrightCove all of a sudden lose their mojo. What AWS has done with Cloudfront is delivered “an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments.”
The no commitments part is what matters. Now, upstart producers can easily and quickly get reliable, low cost, and very efficient content delivery, without the overhead they used to need to pay.
As a streaming media participant for over ten years, this is a big breakthrough move, and will create a whole new game for those who want to stream better, and for less.
That’s a huge step in the right direction indeed. Have you seen what the folks at SImpleCDN are doing as a comparison? http://simplecdn.com/
They’re private and battling the resources of Amazon would be tough at those tight margins, but an interesting option that seems like it would be significantly less expensive for even moderate needs and it supports CNAMES. So if bad things happen migrating content and repointing your CNAMEs might be a risk mitigation strategy.