Use your Amazon Cloudfront account
Last updated on Feb. 17, 2010
Many developers use the Amazon Web Services because of easy signup and low pricing. Their content delivery service, Cloudfront, can be set up to store and stream your Bits on the Run videos. You then profit from the low prices from AWS and don't pay us for any traffic. You will still pay us for content usage, which covers the costs of using our management system.
How it works
First, you need to be signed up for both the S3 and Cloudfront services from AWS.
Second, you can sign up for a new Bits on the Run account, thereby checking that you want to use your own Amazon Cloudfront account. You then have to provide us with your AWS security credentials, which can be found in the account section of AWS.
On signup, we check your credentials and setup your AWS account for streaming with Bits on the Run. This all happens automatically behind the scenes. You won't have to do anything, except starting to upload!
Features
When streaming through your own Cloudfront account, the following features are enabled:
- Videos you upload to Bits on the Run are automatically converted and pushed to your S3 bucket. Videos you delete from Bits on the Run are automatically removed. In that sense, Bits on the Run acts as an easy to use front-end for your AWS account.
- Videos can be published with a Bits on the Run player, which enables the dynamic bitrate switching functionality of Cloudfront, so videos will play at any bandwidth.
- Direct download links to videos are available through our Contentserver. These direct download links are in fact 302 redirects to the videos on your S3 bucket, but the files on the bucket itself are signed and secured. This means you can enable/disable downloads with a simple toggle in the Bits on the Run dashboard.
- Bits on the Run tracks video views statistics for your files, both for in-player streams and direct downloads.
In short, the full featureset of Bits on the Run is available even when streaming through your own AWS account. All relevant streaming and security settings of both S3 and Cloudfront can be managed through the Bits on the Run dashboard and API.
The only difference between using BOTR + AWS and using BOTR standalone is that you pay Amazon for your traffic instead of us.
Operations
Under water, Bits on the Run performs the following operations on your AWS account upon creation:
- We create an S3 bucket (XXXXXXX.botr.s3.amazonaws.com) to store the converted videos in. Original videos remain in our own datacenter, close to our transcoders.
- We create a Cloudfront streaming distribution to stream the videos through. This distribution will replicate all videos from your S3 bucket. The cache refresh timeout is set to 7 days.
When managing videos from the Bits on the Run dashboard or API, we perform the following actions to keep your AWS account in sync:
- Newly created conversions are uploaded to your S3 bucket.
- Conversions of videos that are deleted are removed from your S3 bucket.
It is important to not change any of the settings of the S3 bucket and Cloudfront distribution Bits on the Run generates, since that can destroy the syncing process and take your videos down.
