Seattle - Apr 22, 2011 - On April 19, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services introduced a new service that could be of interest to many broadcasters. Amazon now offers live HTTP streaming for Amazon Cloud Front. Used with Amazon EC2 running Adobe's Flash Media Server and Amazon Route 53 (AWS's DNS service), webcasters can now deliver live video via Amazon Web Services.

What this means is that video (and undoubtedly audio-only) content providers can now distribute their content via a virtual server that exists inside the EC2. However; how wise is it to completely turn over an organization's means of distribution to another enterprise? Only two days after Amazon's content distribution announcement was made, the EC2 suffered a major system-wide failure, affecting huge Internet services such as Twitter, Netflix and Zynga, from April 21 to 22, 2011. (Amazon's own description of the problems: status.aws.amazon.com.)