RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol) is a web transmission standard which allows a backend server to transfer video, audio and data to the Flash Player. It’s particularly useful for video streaming, since the Flash Player can communicate back to the server about how much video it has consumed, and how much more video the server needs to send. This is a distinct advantage over so-called progressive download video, where a web server simply begins sending bytes out to the video player over standard HTTP until there are no more bytes to send.

In addition to saving bandwidth and allowing better seeking control, RTMP is harder to steal content, allows dynamic bitrate switching and is able to stream live content.

Amazon added RTMP to the CloudFront servers in December 2009 and thus became a real CDN (Content Delivery Network), offering content providers a simple and reliable way to host, format and deliver their video content at high speeds.

CloudFront Streaming is very easy to set up with the JW Player 5.3.

Today a created the first video-distributions on Amazon CloudFront by using the AWS-Console. This process is very straightforward.

The following parameters are used to embed a streaming-videofile in a webpage using a flash-player or the HTML5 <video> tag.

• videofile = path/filename.ext
• streamer = rtmp://xxxxxxxxxxxxx.cloudfront.net/cfx/st/
• provider = rtmp

The suffixes /cfx/st/ at the end of the URL are required to access the streaming-server at the CloudFront server. Videofile extensions can be mp4, flv and webm.