S3, EC2, and Wowza: Funny Names for Media Management

Developing a flexible media platform for Truth For Life

Some voices are unforgettable: your mother, your child, your favorite musical artist or actor. For those following the teachings of Alistair Begg at Truth For Life, they will tell you that his voice and presence are part of his strength as a pastoral minister and teacher. Over the years, Truth For Life had amassed a collection of audio sermons and video broadcasts of Alistair's teachings. Now it was time to find a strategic way to share these on the web without breaking the bank.

In redesigning the website, Communications Manager Jenn Nenadov and her staff wanted to bring this rich media content to the website for users to listen, watch, download, and purchase. The challenge would be to make sure that accessing all this media would not slow down website performance. So the team at Five Q recommended Amazon Web Services for some flexible media management tools.

Amazon Offers Web Services?

The same Amazon that most people know for great online shopping also offers a suite of web services available for developers and consumers. As part of the Amazon Web Services offerings, we recommended the Simple Storage Service (S3) as the platform for storing all of Truth For Life's audio files and videos, and the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for virtual computing. These pieces, coupled with the Wowza Media Server 2 for streaming of video and audio files to multiple platforms such as desktop computers or mobile phones, would handle all of the technical media infrastructure needs.

By using these services, we were able to provide a stable and reliable storage and streaming platform that did not require massive upgrades to the current website server or slow down website performance when media was viewed. The cost savings were further mitigated by the pay-per-usage structure developed by Amazon, so Truth For Life would only pay for storage and data transfers actually used. With capabilities to access these services from anywhere on the web, they were easily integrated into the website platform and flexible enough to scale depending on the ministry's needs.

Getting the Message Out

Since the media integration, Truth For Life averages 25,000 pageviews per month for media alone, and over 555,000 media files accessed on average each month. With such a high volume of activity, our recommendations for Amazon Web Services and other media platforms has allowed Truth For Life to continue to provide quality delivery of their media offerings globally.