MinistryMedia.org

Amazon is a household name and now that name is becoming more common in webhosting circles.

Why is this important for ministries who use media? = cheap and reliable web storage.

All of the media that you create needs to get into the hands of those that you are trying to reach. Downloadable video and audio has been littering our hard drive for years now. If you want your message to hit the masses – then you have to make it available to them. One common method is to place your media (audio or video) on your website for download. A subscribed download of your media- is called a podcast. Every time your files are downloaded, someone has to pay for the bandwidth. It’s like cell phone minutes – you think you’ve having fun on the phone – until you get the bill at the end of the month and realize that you used up all of your minutes and the overage charges are killing you.

Amazon’s web services devision has a solution for mass download storage. Amazon’s S3 (simple storage solutions) is not for everyone, but it is providing us (DTS) a very cheap alternative for podcast hosting. For a few years we have been using our streaming provider (Akamia) to host our podcasts. Bandwidth for streaming is not cheap, and as a result – as our podcast has grown in popularity so have our bandwidth charges.

Bandwidth is charged by the amount of data that is transferred. For example, if your MP3 is 10 Megabytes in size, you will be charged for every time it is downloaded. If it is downloaded 100 times then you would be charged for 1000 Megabytes (which is equivalent to 1 Gigabyte).

Our streaming provider charged a flat fee of $1.29 per Gigabyte.

Amazon charges $0.18 per Gigabyte! (once you hit 10 Terabytes it drops to $0.16 – and then to $0.13 at 50 Terabytes)

Now let’s imagine that you have a very popular podcast and consume 1 Terabyte of bandwidth each month. On the old provider it would cost you $1290. On Amazon the same bandwidth would cost you only $180!

Now Amazone S3 is not for everyone. But for raw download, the price is untouchable.

http://aws.amazon.com/

The video is amazing. It was produced by the talented folks that I am blessed to work with at DTS. The audio is a mix of two interviews. One was record by Jim Hoover at an advancement event. The other audio was recorded by a phone interview. (Yes, it sounds like a phone interview – but we couldn’t fly on this gig)
Josh Groft (Producer) and Ryan Holmes (Production Manager and Compositor) came up with the idea of the look of the video. Josh edit the audio to make the story and together they found still images of the TVs. Ryan through this magical skills, animated the entire piece in After Effects. And of course our audio genius Jonathan Galloway (Audio Engineer) created the beautiful audio. Some of the background tracks were given to us from Deuce’s production company.

All I can say is “WOW”.