Amazon’s Cloud Not Being Used For New Video On Demand Service

Last week, numerous sites were reporting that Amazon would be storing and delivering the movies for their newly announced video on demand service from the Amazon cloud computing infrastructure. As of now, Amazon is not storing or using any of it’s cloud computing infrastructure to store or deliver any of the movies and Amazon has confirmed that their Web Services group is not involved with supporting the video on demand offering. While this could always change between now and when then product rolls out of beta, today, the streaming and storage of content is being done via Limelight Networks.

This really comes as no surprise since Amazon’s Web Services offering is not setup to do streaming, does not have a global footprint and as we saw this past weekend, still has problems with major outages. Not that traditional CDNs don’t have down time, but I can’t remember the last time an Akamai or Limelight was down for fours hours at a time.

I’ve also learned that even when the Amazon video on demand service rolls out of beta, HD quality videos will not be available. No one will confirm the time frame for when HD quality will be added, but as of now, it won’t be anytime soon.