Streaming MP3s from Amazon S3

To update the answer to this question, if you want to actually STREAM to clients, you can use Amazon Cloudfront on top of your S3 bucket (as mentioned by Rudolf). Create a "streaming distribution" in Cloudfront that points to your S3 bucket.

This will stream via RTMP (good for web and Android devices). You can use JW Player or a similar player to play the streamed files.

Cloudfront Streaming uses Adobe Flash Media Server 3.5.

There is also the ability to play secure content using signed urls.

Yes it is. Firstly, you need to create a bucket in your S3 account which is all in lower case, is globally unique and is DNS-compatible; so for example I created a bucket called ‘media.torusknot.com’.

Then to make it all look nice you need to create a DNS CNAME entry to map a sub-domain of your site to that S3 bucket. That will allow you to access your files you upload to that S3 bucket via ‘http://media.example.com/somefile.mp3’. You do just need to set the ACLs on the files & the bucket to make sure public access is allowed.

Finally, if you want to stream video files via a Flash player from S3 to another domain, you also have to tell Flash that it’s ok for the content to be pulled in from a different domain. Create a file called ‘crossdomain.xml’ in the bucket, with these contents:

<cross-domain-policy>
<site-control permitted-cross-domain-policies="all"/>
</cross>

That allows the media to be accessed from anywhere - you can be more specific if you want but this is the simplest approach.

Related resources:

• Using Amazon Web Services
• Streaming Media From Amazon S3