How to increase loadings of digital content (audio and videos)? What are the options to get files faster ?

Question

I have a mobile application which is linked to a programming platform which manages images with audio and video content. We use the S3 service with a container that saves files. When our customers use the App, it sends a request to AWS to trigger scheduled content.  The problem is that during an opening, there were 200 people using the App to view content.  It took more than 1 minute to get the contents. What is the problem ? Isn't it possible for content to be obtained faster, in seconds? Currently, it's way too long and customers are unhappy with the loading time. What are the options to get files faster ?.

Nuno_Q · Answer

You can use Amazon CloudFront to serve the content and cache the content closer to the edge. In your current architecture your users are requesting the content directly to the S3 bucket in a specific region. If the users are in a geographic location further away from the S3 bucket region the Time to First Byte (TTFB) to be downloaded takes longer as opposed to having the content cached at the edge closer to end users.
Also you can look at ways to compress the video, audio and images because most likely each device will not need the same video resolution/bitrate due to the available screen size differences between PC's, mobile phones and tablets.
You can find further information about Amazon CloudFront here: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/getting-started/S3/
For video and audio processing and compression you can look at AWS Elemental MediaConvert and you can find information about this AWS Service here: https://aws.amazon.com/mediaconvert/
We have a published AWS VOD Solution that leverages MediaConvert and CloudFront here: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/implementations/video-on-demand-on-aws/

For image resizing at the edge you can see the following solution https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/image-optimization-using-amazon-cloudfront-and-aws-lambda/

Deepam Agarwal · Answer

You can optimize the performance of your application using CloudFront. There are even more things that you can do on the application level to optimize page load speeds further. 
For example, front end optimization techniques include compression, image optimizations, minification and removing render blocking JavaScript.
However to start with this, you should consider using CloudFront that will have a caching strategy to cache the static content and serve users from edge locations.
For more information on this, please check AWS document/blog: 
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/improve-your-website-performance-with-amazon-cloudfront/
https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/getting-started/S3/

How to increase loadings of digital content (audio and videos)? What are the options to get files faster ?

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