It couldn't have been better timed. Amazon has announced their forthcoming CDN service on the AWS Blog. Once released this service will be a perfect complement to Panda, allowing videos to be streamed to users even more efficiently!

You will start by storing your content in an Amazon S3 bucket and then marking the content as publicly readable. Next you'll make a single API call to register the bucket. The call will return a domain name that you'll use to refer to your content in your web page or application. When clients request the object via the returned domain name they'll be routed to the nearest edge location, for high performance delivery.

Earlier in the year, we found many of our clients were looking for a solution to allow users to easily upload their own videos. We had a good look into the numerous existing services already available, but ultimately found none quite fit the bill; either being too expensive, closed source or overly complex. Panda was conceived to be a simple open source solution for handling online video. Essentially, Panda allows you seamlessly integrate video uploading, encoding and streaming into your web application, while utilizing the power of the cloud.

We took inspiration from what was already out there and distilled it down to its core. Panda runs entirely on Amazon's Web Services utilising EC2, S3 and SimpleDB and the Merb framework. Once you've started up the application on an EC2 instance you can access the API and administration backend. The REST API allow painless integration with your own web application. Videos are uploaded directly to Panda and transcoded using FFmpeg to any format you desire. Video can be streamed using any Flash video player such as the JW FLV Media Player, and with the addition of h264 support in Flash 0.9.115 users can enjoy full HD quality.

So, visit the Panda site, grab the code from Github, read the Getting Started Guide and don't forget to join the Google Group if you have any questions or success stories to talk about!

We don't normally use the blog to announce the launch of client websites, but it might interest some people to check out some of the work we actually do. With this in mind, I'd like to introduce you to Protect The Human, a recently launched project for Amnesty International UK that we have been working on for the past few months in collaboration with our design peeps up in London Made by Many. Though it has been publicly available for a couple of weeks now, I wanted to let the dust settle a bit before posting.

So what is it? It is different things depending on who you talk to, but for me it is an assortment of different parts, playing a key role in Amnesty's online strategy to increasing activism (catchy, eh?). It is firstly a content publishing platform; populated by fantastic Amnesty videos, galleries of images about the work they do, and masses of bookmarks to fascinating and current content all over the interweb. But this is not purely a top down publishing platform, users of the site are actively encouraged to create their own content, and rate comment and discuss any item that is on there.

This is a site about activism: the small things people can do which collectively create interest for others and effect change on important issues. Users are prompted to take various actions at every opportunity, depending on the time they have available. Examples of actions can be signing online petitions for the victims of Human rights abuses, attending protests, or simply sending great content to friends to help spread the word. This aspect of the site has been a real eye opener, I have never before seen so many opportunities to take proactive action on such important issues in such an accessible way.

There are other parts to this site, such as hubs for the various campaigns Amnesty UK are engaged in, and rather than me describe it all, the best thing to do is to have a poke around. Because we worked in an Agile way, there are still more features which are going to be rolling out soon, and we hope to be iteratively improving the site over the next few months.

We will probably be talking about how the Agile process worked in practice on this at some point, but that will have to wait a bit. For the moment, have a look, sign up, and take some actions. There really isn't any excuse not to, the site makes it so easy to make a contribution, whatever that might be.