Amazon adds private streaming to CloudFront

Amazon Web Services has added the ability for customers of CloudFront to choose who gets to receive content streamed using the service, the company said on Sunday.

CloudFront is a Web service for content delivery that is being beta tested by Amazon Web Services. In December, Amazon expanded the service with the ability to stream audio and video files with Adobe's Flash Media Server. Now, with a feature called private content, CloudFront customers can control which users get to receive their streamed content and when "by combining dates, date ranges, IP addresses, and IP address ranges" to set up access policies, according to an Amazon Web Services blog post.

The private content feature was first announced in November last year, but then only for static content. It lets customers both charge for and protect content, according to AWS.

There is no extra charge for use of the private content feature, and customers can start using it today for streamed content, the blog post said.

CloudFront customers pay for data transfer and the number of requests users make. They also have to pay for the storage of their content on Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service).

Amazon Web Services has also added Singapore to its list of edge locations, places from where content can be distributed using CloudFront.

Using Singapore as an edge location will reduce latency for end users in the country itself and throughout Southeast Asia, according to Amazon. There are now 15 edge locations scattered around the world. Depending on where the users are located CloudFront automatically send them to the most appropriate location, Amazon said.