S3, Tara, and Media Giraffe

It looks like I'm going to be teaching Tara web design. It actually sounds like fun.

I've been spending too much a lot of time playing with Amazon S3, because of Project Shoestring. It's a neat system... apparently part of Twitter's backend runs off of it.

The way I've been explaining this to people has centered around the concept that it lends you economies of scale. So if you need to host an online portfolio, it's probably not cost effective, but if your project needs to handle outrageous amounts of traffic or send very large files, it's much cheaper than dedicated hosting.

I started thinking about what this can do for journalism, and my first instinct was, well, nothing. Journalism is mostly short videos and blocks of text. It doesn't seem to need it.

But then again, maybe it doesn't have to be. There's some really interesting stuff going on with IPTV. There have been online "TV stations" like Revision3 for some time, but they used to distribute using poor quality or exclusively by BitTorrent. They've only recently been able to stream video, thanks to Flash 9 (H.264 encoded video) and specialized services like Bit Gravity and BrightCove, which aren't cheap.

But Amazon S3 is designed for services like this, and it charges based on usage, so it's possible to start a small streaming video operation with only a few advertisers.

This is happening at a time where the costs of equipment is in freefall. You can buy a decent prosumer HD camera for $600. It doesn't support XLR and it records to HDV, but it does the job.

So, hypothetically, a group of tech-savvy journalists could do broadcast style coverage and deliver high quality content via web without the startup costs of an actual broadcast station.

Would it be sustainable? Perhaps, but it's a longshot. The point is, now it's plausible, whereas ten years ago the technology to do something like this didn't even exist.