Amazon's AWS Won't Compete With CDNs

Over the past few months, there has been a lot of speculation on what Amazon (AMZN) might be working on in regards to its EC2 and S3 service and whether or not its AWS offering is going to compete with content delivery networks. Adding to the confusion was the fact that Jeff Bezos made a brief announcement of a new upcoming streaming service but was scant on details.

Amazon's new video on demand content offering went into beta last week. The new offering is not a streaming service that has anything to do with AWS and is simply a new content offering that enhances the functionality of Amazon's legacy Unbox service. The Amazon Web Services group is not supporting the new streaming content offering and the content is being delivered by Limelight Networks (LLNW).

That being said, Amazon's EC2 and S3 service continues to be a good option for developers who want to deliver their own video and provides a cheap and flexible way to do so. The Amazon service is not going after the same size customers the CDNs are and does not provide many of the elements a CDN does. Amazon is not going to be taking any major business away from the CDNs for numerous reason.

Amazon's EC2 service is located in the U.S. and S3 is only located in the U.S. and Europe. There is no global coverage with either service, although in an interview I did this week with Adam Selipsky, VP, Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services, he did say that down the road they will expand into the Asia Pacific market with coverage. Many customers who use CDNs do so in order to take advantage of the global delivery.

The average CDN customer is also not a developer, which is exactly who Amazon's customers are. In order to use the EC2 and S3 service, you have to be a customer who wants to be very hands on, do a lot of the work yourself and in the case of streaming, license the server software from Adobe (ADBE) or Microsoft (MSFT). Amazon does not provide any video specific reporting tools for raw logs and AWS customers have to deal with parsing raw logs through a third party system, specific for video.

 

The Amazon service also does not work well for live streaming as EC2 and S3 are not setup for edge delivery and were designed for storing objects, something that does not take place when the stream is live. There are also no additional content services in the eco-system that many customers need like transcoding, authentication or stream protection. The bottom line is that right now, the EC2 and S3 products are for a very different set of customers than the CDNs are targeting. If you are a developer that needs U.S. based delivery, Amazon could be a really good fit and it publishes its pricing on the company's website, something no major CDN does.

What I think Amazon should do is license the Adobe Flash Media Server directly from Adobe and then rent it out on an hourly basis like Amazon already does with other third party platforms. This would enable more developers who need the FMS server to look at Amazon as an option, instead of having to go and buy their own license from Adobe.

While Amazon's AWS service is not a fit for most of those who use a CDN today, it is interesting to see how some of the CDNs are using Amazon's service to their advantage. Digital Fountain is building their streaming only, U.S. based CDN on Amazon Web Services and other CDNs like Voxel.net have direct integration with Amazon's S3 API.

Disclosure: None

Comments

[copernicus]

Be nice if this 'expert' would actually define a CDN... cant even do it on his blog.

[copernicus]

Disclosure --- this is where you are suppose to say you worked for Mirror Image, or are currently working for a company that is related to this field.

[Dan Rayburn]

If you don't know what the term "CDN" means, then this article is not for you.

Disclosure: I am not working for any CDN and have disclosed this on my blog numerous times. I could not make it any clearer. See my post entitled:

Investors: I Don't Work For Any Content Delivery Network (CDN)
blog.streamingmedia.co...

This article is about Amazon and content delivery. I don't work for Amazon and I don't work for any CDN. You can try to "imply" a conflict exists, but readers should only be interested in facts.

[copernicus]

Here is an actual list, with definitions of what a CDN is, and services they offer.

www.contentinople.com/...

[Dan Rayburn]

That is a short list. For a detailed list of CDNs globally, including P2P based solutions, there are over 60 providers. You can see the list at www.cdnlist.com

[RichardLanham]

Wowza Media Server, a streaming Flash media server, does have an EC2 offering, an AWS devpay product. And Wowza has origin/edge configuration. Here is a link:
wowzamedia.com/ec2.php