Amazon CloudFront

Table of Contents

Amazon CloudFront is a web service for content delivery. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments.

Setup

For background information, please refer to the AWS Cloudfront developer guide. You can use your own origin, an EC2 instance or S3 bucket is not needed for HTTP ABR streaming (but can be used also).

The tutorial for ‘creating a download distribution‘ is straightforward and can be done from the AWS console, as described here.

Basically there are three steps:

  • Create a (download) distribution
  • Enter the origin name
  • Set cache behaviour

When this has been done, a similar entry as the following will appear in your Cloudfront Management Console:

../../_images/console.png

All that is needed to use this is to replace the origin referencing URLs with the cloudfront referencing URLs.

Example

The following URL loads the player from the origin and then references the stream also from the origin:

http://demo.unified-streaming.com/players/mmp20120605/player.html?file=http://demo.unified-streaming.com/video/ateam/ateam.ism/Manifest

Alternatively, both could be fetched from the AWS Cloudfront:

http://d19otbbbxw77t6.cloudfront.net/players/mmp20120605/player.html?file=http://d19otbbbxw77t6.cloudfront.net/video/ateam/ateam.ism/Manifest

Other combinations are possible too (player from origin - or elsewhere like a website - and the stream comes from Cloudfront).

Advanced

For more advanced topics, please reference the AWS Cloudfront documentation for topics not listed here.

It is possible to for instance do the following:

Also, please check the pricing plans carefully - so there are no surprises afterwards.

Smooth Streaming

Cloudfront can be used for ‘on-demand streaming of media files in the Microsoft Smooth Streaming format‘.

When using Unified Packager to create the Smooth Streaming package, it is important to follow the Packaging for HTTP Smooth Streaming (HSS) guidelines.