Internet Marketing Business Blog James Schramko

Great resource James – thanks. I was going to compare S3 with other options and had it on my list for tomorrow. You’ve just saved me a couple of hours… at least.

Cool!

I was a complete novice the other day and now I have streaming set up the way I want.

My forum has a lot of videos in it and all my sales pages have video on them (or coming).

This was the easiest way for me to get what I needed.

I always enjoy learning what other people think about Amazon Web Services and how they use them. I hope the readers of this blog will want to check out CloudBerry Explorer that helps to manage S3 on Windows . It is a freeware. http://cloudberrylab.com/

Thanks Andy,

Another S3 manager is the Firefox addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3247

S3 is a great tool, I don’t think you need EZS3 though, there’s a multitude of free players out there that allow you to put videos on your site pretty easily.

Shelby I looked at free players but many of them require coding and mucking about.

How do they go for security and allowing for full screen mode etc…?

Do you have any recommendations?

(Often I have found that free is very expensive in the longrun. The last thing I want to be doing is mucking around with code).

I just used JW FLV player

http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player/

I think it’s free for non-commercial items, for a commercial licence it’s not that much though.

Basically you just upload your file to S3 change permissions so people can watch it – all done with your ftp client.

Next Upload JW FLV files to your server – you only do this once.

Then you can customize your player here – http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player-setup-wizard

Note – Make sure to include a link to your file in S3 and that the video player links are the correct file locations on your site – you may want to direct link to them.

Finally you paste the code in your site that the above link generates.

Not too much hassle and basically free. It also seems to take about as much time as the above service.

I think ezs3 is considerably faster and easier!

Upload,

Create player

One java script code paste to site.

(any site or blog)

Same thing, but in all fairness I haven’t tried EZS3.

1. Upload file – Same as FTP
2. Create Code – Almost the same thing minus the cool visual interface
3. Paste Code – same thing

Of course the first comment is how to setup everything so it sounds longer, but admittedly if you were doing hundreds of these a month it would make more sense to have a program to manage them.

IMHO

True – I am uploading to hundreds of different sites and using multiple formats – MPG4, flv, swf, avi, pdf, MP3 so the easy to use player interface is a MUST

Hey James,

Thanks for the recommendation – I found EZS3 to be very easy to use and can see how it could become addictive. Got my first video up and running very easily. Ties in nicely with the page creator tools too!

Gotta go find some offline clients to fund my addictions now…

Steve

Doh! I put the wrong site URL in to show off my wonderful video skills.

Reckon Russell Crowe’s got anything to worry about?

Steve

“Reckon Russell Crowe’s got anything to worry about?”

…having met him and done business with him I am sure he has plenty to worry about…. in contrast, you are nothing like him so you have nothing to worry about. For example you can play decent music……. (G’Day Russ )

What is your opinion of viddler.com? It’s free with no ads.
Cheers,
Gail

Viddler looks pretty good. If I wanted free hosting with no ads then that looks like the best way to go.

I want control of my content now in case they change later.
(for example brightcove told people to remove the free stuff with short notice).

OK. I see where you’re coming from. Thanks James!
Gail

Very nice information. I have been looking for a video hosting service so this article is extremely helpful to me. I’ll give it a go!

Thanx James, Just the info I was looking for. Direct and simple. Keep it up.

Thanks James, read this post a few times while comparing options. I completely missed the EZs3 part until I watched the movie. Signing up right now… CHeers!

Thanks George!

It is an excellent service.

Hey James

Thanks for the write-up

We have been busy re-investing and developing our services… setting up the Cloudfront for all our users and making it easy to roll-out for their accounts and players, upgrading and expanding on our servers etc

These were all key improvements to allow us to roll-out the Premium Video Marketing services that we’ve been working on behind the scenes

The first one is codenamed: underlay

It’s what happens when the video finishes.. instead of seeing a blank video frame.. you can now show something else….

It allows you to automatically re-direct the video (think affiliate marketing – do a video review and then re-direct to the site, cart item, eBay auction or whatever)

It also allows you to put a script there (think Landing Pages / Squeeze Pages and Opt-in Forms… the video finishes.. and the form to join your list appears! )

—–

I have more in the pipeline….

(Let me know if you would like to beta test the underlay)

TomC

Tom I would definitely be ready to use that service. I’m loving your product since I use it almost every day now for my private membership site!

Can IP address of server be used instead of url to limit where the file is viewable from?

The embeded call references the file by a number – file name would be better.

Excellent review and how-to video thanks James. As a non-techie it made setting all of it up very straight-forward, which was a relief as the Amazon side of things seems to be tailored towards fully fledged geeks.

How does this EZS3 compare to using Amazon Cloudfront? I don’t think Cloudfront was an option at the time that you wrote this article.

http://www.reelseo.com/amazon-cloudfront-streaming/

@Shaun I use cloudfront with EZS3.

Just get an account and tick that box and it streams from there….

Thanks for sharing the Viddler site it will really help me to put videos that are only fed to my video blog which will is about helping others by sharing some of the best videos from the IM niche.

Hey James,

I must agree. I have been using Amazon for a while now, since you recommended it. We upload all of our client review videos and then simply create a page on our site – go into Amazon, create a player, set the controls and size and bingo – take the embed code and paste it into the page. I was talking to someone about this and they said how great it would be if when the video was finished it went off to our survey. Is there such a think as a URL redirect in the kit bag of Ezs3 and if so, how would one go about getting this feature. Thanks for you all you help and advice.

EZS3 has such a feature and also the ‘underlay’ which is a one time payment. It will bring some code up after the video stops. Click on the tab inside your members area that says “Premium services and other cool stuff”

thank you for the useful information
I see that the video above plays from cloudfront…what is the difference between that and Amazon S3 account?

which one is better
thank you!
J

You can activate cloudfront in amazon. It serves the video closer to your location.

Great content James. Thanks.

Been checking Amazon S3 and EZS3 as a solution for my video blog and still have some questions:

Does the $20 monthly investment mean that you get the benefits of ease and efficiency of file management, enhanced customisation of player and good flexibility for video type?

Are there any other benefits such as an improved playback experience for blog users?

I’m using JW Player for WordPress with the .flv file hosted on S3 and still not getting smooth playback from the video. It plays back no more smoothly than it did when I held the file on my regular Bluehost server space. My internet connection is a pretty quick broadband connection.

I’m wondering if it’s something to do with my video recording/production options like bitrate, framerate or codec. It does play smoothly using the desktop application “Adobe Media Player’.

Thanks,

Wayne

@Wayne, yes the fee each month gives you very good management of your players and analytic stats. The playback experience is fully customized from the player look, feel, controls and ending actions such as dropping a script or changing destination. (Also multi players). Yes your rendering settings will likely be causing your playback experience.

Great article and content about how to use Amazon S3 for video and beyond. Amazon is providing a good service. I heard an industry guru reference this tool and you have provided a great article about the process of finding ways to stream video.

Hi James , congratulations for your great article. I am Mac user and I tried to upload a video file to Amazon S3 and I got a red restrictive message on AWS Console indicating that currently Amazon AWS cannot accept a file over 300MB. Do you happen to know any solution that will help me upload to S3 larger than 300MB files?

I use Bucket Explorer as my FTP and it copes with larger sized files

Thank you very much for your fast response. I will give it a try.

Thanks for sharing this resource, James. I’ve been using Vzaar, which works OK, but is relatively expensive compared to streaming files from S3.

Finding the right tool to interact with S3 has been a bit of a challenge. Brightcove looked like the logical choice, but as you noted, it is WAY too expensive. This tool looks both slick and affordable!

Hey James, great info! Just wondering if eZs3 is still your choice for streaming video.

Yes is sure is. I used EZS3 for my TrafficGrab members area and a Lot of people love the multi video player (all in one). It rocks!! Plus we added it to superfastwebsites and superfastvideos. It is our central video content management area.

Great site James.
I’m an Amazon Affiliate and there are some short videos there which I would like to use on my website which promotes products at Amazon. My question is James, am I allowed to copy those short vids to my site which refers customers back to Amazon/those products?

Ray you need to check with the terms and conditions at Amazon.

I think your Twitter gadget is interfering and only allowing part of the video to be seen.

I want to achieve the following, and would really appreciate help…

1. To create simple sales video web pages

2. The videos to stream well worldwide (e.g. Amazon S3 with CloudFront).

3. I am fairly techie, but don’t want to fiddle in code more than necessary.

4. Control over the video player (e.g. ability to auto play, and prevent fast-forward and rewind)

5. I want video to work on iPhone, mobiles, etc without any fuss.

Is there a simple, inexpensive solution out there I should consider? I don’t want to have to mess around with CSS, or with code to detect browsers.

I also want to avoid high fees such as Viddler, where I can’t see what you get for your $100+ per month.

I feel like I’m falling in between two camps:

Camp 1: Those who can’t do it themselves so have to go for something like OptimisePress on WordPress, Kajabi, or a developer + Viddler

Camp 2: Those who know HTML, CSS, and web servers well enough just to do it all themselves.

Any help MUCH appreciated.

Ben sounds like Youtube will sove most of your problems.
Also Vimeo Pro or just plain old EZs3.