A persistent issue with Amazon’s CloudFront is the lack of analytics available – what’s the point of hosting your video on CloudFront when you can’t tell if anyone watched it or if user’s quit after the first 3 seconds. Today’s announcement of streaming access logs goes some way to address this. Amazon will now log all streaming access events such as play, pause, seek, and stop. In addition user details such as IP address, and other data items are logged.
It’s worth noting that there isn’t an inbuilt analytics solution to view the data and user’s will have to arrange for the logs to be read by third party analytics services.