How to build a video e-commerce

18 September, 2013

Recently I planned a project for selling video online. For this purpose I needed an e-commerce platform capable of selling big digital files in a time base at low cost but secure. I selected Prestashop as the e-commerce platform with PrestaVOD module installed. This module provides us with an interface to sell multimedia contents restricted by time periods. PrestaVOD can be connected to various storage services: Localhost, DailyMotion, Amazon AWS and Vimeo.
As videos are big digital files I choosed Amazon AWS (S3/CloudFront) for storing these files. S3 is a service that provides storage through web services interfaces at a usage cost. While CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN). So we keep our multimedia files in S3 and spread them over the Internet with CloudFront. My development platform was an Amazon EC2 service. EC2 allows us to rent virtual computers on which to run our own computer applications like apache and mysql needed by Prestashop.