Powered by Amazon Web Services, StreaminCloud is a free FLV encoder for Amazon S3 (a.k.a Simple Storage Service) and CloudFront. The main objective of StreaminCloud is to help users to encode (convert) those streaming videos in S3 to FLV (the most popular video format on the net and is used by YouTube). Currently, this tool supports dozens of video formats such as wmv, mov, DivX, and AVI.
After signing up an account with the public beta website, you’ll need to let the systems access to your videos files in the S3 bucket. From there, it’ll automatically encode them into the FLV format at a bitrate of 512kbps and at the same dimensions as the original video. You might wonder why use FLV and not other videos formats? Well, it’s known that streaming FLV videos are of a higher quality than its “competitors”. It requires Adobe Flash Player to deliver videos over the Internet.
You can then embed the converted videos on your website and let visitors to stream them. Currently, StreaminCloud only supports the Amazon storage service and probably the folks there will expand their reach by heading to other popular online storage websites. Amazon charges its users $0.150 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used, $0.100 per GB – all data transfer in and $0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out. Prices vary in the United States and Europe.