Rapidly growing video marketing solution eZs3, confirms the winner of the 100 million Twitter competition is Dominic Rivard

According to Managing Director Tom Cone, who expected the competition to run until September when he first launched it March 2009; “We’ve seen explosive growth in the last couple of months”

“Our new services are proving to be very popular with internet marketers and others wanting to use video in their online promotions’

This highly rated  solution allows business owners to make full use of scalable Amazon s3 hosting services and the Amazon Cloudfront (Content Distribution Network) to power their video marketing projects

“Amazon make it affordable, we make it possible” says Tom

eZs3 pronounced easy s3, served up 100 million files for their users Saturday June 27th and Dominic was the Twitterer who guessed closest to that date, winning: Camtasia Studio 6 and Snagit 6, Barefoot Bootcamp,  Video Intensive Training Course and brand new Flip Video Camera

Who knows, maybe the next competition will have to be guess when eZs3 hits a Billion?

Planning to host your videos on Amazon s3 (simple storage service) but first want to know how much it will cost, then use the Amazon S3 hosting calculator .

Now you can quickly compare hosting costs with your current ISP, with this handy ready reckoner – a quick and easy calculator provided by Amazon to help work out their S3 file transfer and hosting charges.

Here’s a recent example:
1. I want to upload videos and embed them in my blog each week.
2. Each file is about 20 megs
3. Each video gets about 400 views (Gradually increasing)

Amazon use Gigabytes on their handy Amazon S3 hosting calculator - so in this case we have to remember to divide by 50 to get the 20 Megabyte equivalent! (for a 10 meg file divide by 100 etc. etc.)

Here’s the calculations for a 20 meg file:

Hosting with Amazon S3 = the one-time upload fee for the file + hosting the file for a month + Bandwidth (views x filesize)

20 Megabyte=50th of a Gigabyte

Upload Cost = $0.10 / 50
Storage Cost = $0.15 / 50
400 Views at 20Mb = 8000Mb Bandwidth = 8GB
Transfer Cost = 8 x $0.17 = $1.36

So to upload a 20 meg file – a fifth of one cent
To store a 20 meg file – just less than a third of a cent each month
The bandwidth of a 20 meg file – $1.36 for 400 views (just over a third of a cent per viewer!)

So..you’re looking at less than $1.40 per month for a 20 Meg video with 400 viewers!
For 1000 views $3.40 (20 gig)

How does that compare?

77 million files delivered by eZs3 already

There’s stll time to enter!

After a chance meeting in the USA, where I was demonstrating eZs3, I suddenly realised that Microsoft, who are taking a pounding in the press because of the way they are always missing the boat when it comes to the web, could finally steal a lead.

They should buy Twitter - right from under the eyes of Google. Here’s the story…

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Amazon S3 have their own approach to pricing. Offering a ‘pay as you go’ service it is a really good fit for bloggers and online marketers. If you don’t get any traffic, you aren’t paying. If you get lots of traffic, then you know that you won’t get hit with a costly surcharge fee or have your blog turned off by your ISP.

But how much does it cost if you have a 20 meg video and have  400  regular viewers?

Amazon use Gigabytes on their handy  Amazon S3 hosting calculator — so you have to remember to divide by 50 to get the Megabyte equivalent!

Here’s the calculations:

Hosting with Amazon S3 = the one-time upload fee for the file + hosting the file for a month + bandwidth (views x filesize)

20 Megabyte=50th of a Gigabyte

Upload Cost = $0.10 / 50
Storage Cost = $0.15 / 50
400 Views at 20Mb = 8000Mb Bandwidth = 8GB
Transfer Cost = 8 x $0.17 = $1.36

So to upload a 20 meg file – a fifth of one cent
To store a 20 meg file – just less than a third of a cent each month
The bandwidth of a 20 meg file – $1.36 for 400 views (just over a third of a cent per viewer!)

So..you’re looking at less than $1.40 per month for a 20 Meg video with 400 viewers!

And if you have 1000 viewers it’s just $3.40

Amazon s3 media solution www.eZs3 continues to grow at an phenomenal rate. The media service which makes it easy for Amazon s3 users to upload, deploy and track their video and audio files has now helped it’s user community to distribute over 57 million files.. 57, 344, 237 in fact.

Here’s a quick run down of how the service has grown 5700 percent in the last 6 months

Aug 2008  = 1 million
Dec 2008 =  6 million
Jan  2009 = 10 million
Feb 2009 = 23 million
Mar 2009 = 38 million
Apr 2009 = 57 million

The recent addition of a CloudFront ‘enabler’ feature has contributed to the continued uptake of the service and means that users videos are being distributed without lag through Amazons Content Distribution Network (CDN)

“Amazon s3 does the heavy lifting” says Tom Cone the founder, ” we just make it easy!”

Pro Blogger David Risley talks about where a blogger should host their videos and  offers 3 routes: Free Hosting, Self Hosting or Remote Hosting

Essentially, you have three viable options:

1. Host your video on one of the many video sites (i.e. Youtube) and simply embed into your blog.
2. Host your video on your own server and embed onto your blog locally.
3. Host your video elsewhere, but a place where you have total control.

Of the 3 choices, David really hits the nail on the head when he says ‘Self hosting’ is not a really a viable option

I totally agree: Hosting media on your own blog server is not a good fit. High bandwidth material like video, eats your resources and you  almost reach the point of not wanting the post to be successful!

Too many viewers and you are into ‘overage’ fees.. or just as bad …your host shuts you down!

For me, I see putting media on remote hosting as giving the same freedom to the blogger as Content Management Systems did for designers. Splitting off the media gives you better control.

For the 3rd option the Amazon S3 and eZs3 combo are suggested.

It’s pretty cool to be mentioned on the same page as the big brands

Having asked people to us Twitter to enter our eZs3 100 million competition - where you can win over $1800 worth of prizes in software, training and a brand new Flip camera – I wanted to show the competition on our Twitter page – http://twitter.com/ezs3

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Amazon are celebrating 3 years of Simpe Storage Service this month and have announced that they will offer 3 months of reduced prices, for ‘transfer-in‘

From Amazon:

” Three years ago this month, Amazon Web Services launched Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as “storage for the internet,” providing “highly scalable, reliable, low-latency storage at very low costs.” Since that time, Amazon S3 has experienced dramatic growth, expanded into Europe, and lowered pricing multiple times as we’ve been able to achieve ever greater economies of scale and pass them on to our customers. Today, the service has grown to store over 52 billion objects and serve over 1 trillion requests per year from customers in over 90 countries. Whether you’ve used Amazon S3 to back up files, host static website content, securely share files with your external business partners, or store scientific, financial, or website data for processing via Amazon EC2, you’ve contributed to this growth.“

“Transfer In” is the charge for uploading your material to Amazon Simple Storage Service and it typically costs just 10cents per gigabyte. As part of their birthday celebrations this has been reduced to just 3 cents per gigabyte

Is that a 70% saving?

The eZs3 100 million competition – launched last Friday has already had some early entries

However, looking at the recent entries to the, I notice that some people have not included the time - only the date in dd / mm/ yyy format

As the entries roll in (twitter in?), I think it will come down to having not only the right day, but also the time of day… so please include the time in your guess

Thanks

TomC