February 25, 2008

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Wowza Flash Media Server Pro Introduction

Question: So we all know there are a ton of startups out there using Flash as their means to deliver their media content, but what does it take to implement your own video app?

Answer: You need a flash server and up until now, you only had one option ready for production use: Purchase Adobe’s Flash Interactive Media Server for almost $5000. (To be fair, there is a trimmed down version without video recording available for $995, but that doesn’t fit my needs.)

In my case, I’ve yearned to implement flash streaming in some of my projects - namely Echonote - but five grand is a pretty penny for bootstrapped projects.

Thankfully, there’s a new kid on the block: Wowza Media Server Pro which is now available for $995 with features that top Adobe’s offerings. Not only that, they offer Wowza Media Server Pro for Amazon EC2 which opens up the playing field even further. For roughly $100 a month(not including upload/download charges), you can have your very own Flash Media Server running on an EC2 instance.

Over the next couple of posts, we’re going to be looking at installing a video recording application with the Wowza Media Server Pro10 developer license on a Mac to get our feet wet and then onto running the app on EC2 with persistent storage on S3.

If you feel like getting a head start, make sure you have the following items set up. We’ll be using all of them!

• Webcam
• Amazon EC2 account
• Amazon S3 account
• Wowza Media Server Pro10 developer license
• Wowza Media Server Pro EC2 license
• S3 plugin for Firefox (optional)