Q:

Serving Streaming Content without streaming distribution

I am new to Streaming Media. I am working on a web application built using Symfony 1.4. It features audio players and I am using jPlayer for the player. I use ffmpeg for encoding the audio files. Currently, I am storing my audio files on the development server. However, I would want to use Amazon S3 Storage Service for storing my audio files. While going through the information available over the WWW and Amzon's site, I came to realize that it would require a streaming distribution service viz. Amazon Cloudfront. At present, I am not using any streaming distribution while I play audio from my server. Is it necessary to use Amazon Cloudfront ? Can't I directly serve my audio files from Amazon S3 by providing a URL as http://s3.mybucket.com/XXX ? What are the consequences of serving files directly from Amazon S3 and not using Cloudfront ?
A demo of the player that I am using can be seen here: http://audiodip.org/project/detailsProject/id/5

A:

If the audio file has to be retrieved from a remote server(in your case S3) you should read and play it as a streaming audio. 
Otherwise it is like downloading the full audio file to the application server and then playing it.
Cloudfront is a content delivery service with which streaming comes of no extra cost. 
So it is better use the streaming service from cloudfront.
and you will have to enable your audio player to play streaming data.

