Thursday June 13th, at 2pm ET, I’ll be moderating another StreamingMedia.com webinar, this time on the topic of, “How To Deliver Live Video In 3 Easy Steps.” Live video is an incredible opportunity to present audiences with engaging content, however the actual execution can present challenges for any online business. From encoding to delivery, the nuances and technical challenges of live streaming can seem downright daunting.

This webinar will cover pragmatic business advice and high-level technical tips through real-world examples. Companies that need to deliver live video will benefit from this discussion. At the end of this webinar, attendees will have the key tools to implement live streaming and avoid common challenges.

Attendees will learn:

• Steps required to deliver from camera to encoder to CDN
• Preparing for potential traffic spikes
• Delivering to mobile devices
• Protecting a live stream from unauthorized viewing
• Geo-blocking a live stream
• Business case studies and lessons learned

We’ll have a full Q&A session in which your questions will be answered and as always, all StreamingMedia.com webinars are free. So register here and save the date for this instructional webinar.

Late in the day on Tuesday, Amazon announced that custom SSL domain names and root domain hosting support features have now been enabled for content owners who want to deliver static and dynamic content via Amazon’s CloudFront delivery service. These two new features are something a lot of content owners have been waiting on and many I have spoken with have been wanting to move to or use Amazon, but couldn’t until Amazon supported these features, especially SSL domain support. While Amazon still has more work to do before they have most of the same functionality as Akamai’s dynamic site acceleration (DSA) product, this new announcement by Amazon opens up a much larger portion of the market to them and puts more pressure on other CDNs. Not to mention, the pricing they just announced with this, not surprisingly, is really cheap. Here’s more details on what Amazon now supports:

Custom SSL Domain Names

• Custom SSL Certificate support lets content owners deliver content over HTTPS using their own domain name and SSL certificate. This gives visitors lower latency and higher reliability along with the security benefits of CloudFront over an SSL connection that uses their own domain name. Amazon customers can also configure CloudFront to use HTTPS connection for origin fetches so that the data is encrypted end-to-end from origin to the end user.
• Customers can sign up for an invitation to use the Custom SSL Certificate feature by filling out the form on the AWS website and once approved, customers can upload the SSL certificate and use the AWS Management Console to associate it with their CloudFront distributions.
• Customers will pay $600 per month for each custom SSL certificate associated with one or more CloudFront distributions. This monthly fee is pro-rated by the hour. For example, if a customer had a custom SSL certificate associated with at least one CloudFront distribution for just 24 hours (i.e. 1 day) in the month of June, their total charge for using the custom SSL certificate feature in June will be (1 day / 30 days) * $600 = $20.

Root Domain Hosting

• With Root Domain Hosting, customers can use Amazon CloudFront to deliver content from the root domain, or “zone apex” of their website. For example, they will be able to configure both http://www.example.com and http://example.com to point at the same CloudFront distribution, without the performance penalty or availability risk of managing a redirect service.
• To use this feature, customers create an Amazon Route 53 Alias record to map the root of their domain to their CloudFront distribution.
• There will be no extra fees from Route 53, as Alias queries that are mapped to a CloudFront distribution are provided free of charge.

These two newly supported features in CloudFront come on the heels of them recently adding functionality for configurable minimum time-to-live (TTL), query string caching, support for multiple origins and URL based cache behaviors. Add in new support for cookies, front-end-optimization, lower pricing and new edge locations and Amazon’s CloudFront service is quickly becoming a real-world content delivery service, for static and dynamic objects, that many content owners are relying on. I continue to hear more and more large content owners using Amazon and that’s only going to grow faster, now that CloudFront has even more functionality.

As I blogged about back in February, one of the biggest reasons companies have taken note of Amazon’s new dynamic content delivery service is the fact that Amazon doesn’t charge a premium for their service, something most other vendors do. Amazon’s dynamic content delivery pricing is exactly the same as their CloudFront CDN pricing. There are also no platform fees, setup fees, overage charges, and many customers find that they don’t need to use expensive professional services to configure dynamic applications, further decreasing the cost of using CloudFront for dynamic content delivery.

Amazon’s strength, with all of their AWS services, is their ability to develop products that specifically target the largest portion of any market they enter, make it simple and easy to use, bring transparency to the offering and offer low pricing. That’s the definition of a company that has the ability to disrupt any market it enters and that’s exactly what Amazon is starting to do with their CloudFront delivery service and will continue to do even more over time.

Thanks to a lot of really great speakers and presenters who covered content, business and technical topics around online video, we had a great Streaming Media East conference last month. Almost all of the videos from the event are now available online, for free at www.streamingmedia.com/videos and most of the slides from the presentations can be downloaded from the Streaming Media East agenda page. We have about half a dozen videos to still post and some slide decks are still missing that I will upload as soon as the presenters send them to me.

The 2014 Streaming Media East conference will take place May 12-14, at the same venue, so mark your calendars now. If you have any follow-up questions from the event, please don’t hesitate to contact me at anytime.

Andy Plesser from Beet.TV was on hand at the Streaming Media East show two weeks ago and did his usual great job of interviewing a bunch of speakers, videos of which are now online. Click on the image below to check out all of Andy’s coverage.

Thanks to everyone who helped make the recent Content Delivery Summit such a success! We had a great sharing of information amongst service providers, cable operators, content owners and syndicators and industry vendors. Lots of really detailed data and analytics was shared, which was the whole purpose of the event, to help educate the market on many different kinds of web, acceleration and media delivery technologies. All of the content from the event is now available online, for free at www.contentdeliverysummit.com/2013. All of the slides from the presenters can be downloaded from the Content Delivery Summit website as well.

I will be bringing the show back again next year, on Monday May 12th, 2014, at the same venue, so mark your calendars now. If you have any follow-up questions from the event, please don’t hesitate to contact me at anytime.

Even though the Content Delivery Summit and Streaming Media East conference just ended, it’s already time for me to start working on the agenda for our next show. The Streaming Media West show will take place November 18-20 and this year, we’re moving it to a new location – the Hyatt Regency in Huntington Beach CA.

The call for speakers is now open and the submission deadline is July 15th. Those who want to moderate or do a how-to presentation should contact me now with their ideas. If you are new to the submission process, please, read the instructions on the submission page as it is very detailed. And if you still have any questions, just pick up the phone and give me a call at 917-523-4562. I am always available to answer any questions about the submission process, discuss your ideas or help you with your pitch.

Unlike many shows that publish an agenda and then ask you to pick from it, I use your ideas and your submissions to build the program so right now, it’s a clean slate and I’m open to all ideas and suggestions on topics and focus. In addition to the usual business, content and technology topics we cover, we’ll also have a dedicated track on OTT video and we’ll be adding a satellite event this year, focusing on video production topics like shooting, lightning, audio, webcasting and the gear that makes it all possible. So come up with your best ideas and get your submissions in on time!

Thursday May 30th, at 2pm ET, I’ll be moderating another StreamingMedia.com webinar on the topic of, “HEVC.”The most recent video compression standard, HEVC / H.265, is expected to become the video standard of choice over the next decade. As with each generation of video compression technology before it, H.265 promises to reduce the overall cost of delivering and storing video assets while maintaining or increasing the quality of experience delivered to the viewer. This webinar will address what H.265 is, how it differs from previous generations of compression technology including H.264, key barriers to widespread adoption, and thoughts on when H.265 is likely to be implemented.

Join Harmonic, Telestream, Ericsson, and Elemental on this live web event and learn:

• Why HEVC is important
• What makes HEVC better
• What issues remain to be resolved to enable HEVC deployment
• What markets will benefit from HEVC
• Which markets will adopt HEVC first
• What will be the likely replacement role out of HEVC for existing AVC / H.264 deployments

We’ll have a full Q&A session in which your questions will be answered and as always, all StreamingMedia.com webinars are free. So register here and save the date for this instructional webinar.