How does streaming from an AWS S3 bucket work?

Background

If your using an Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 bucket as your storage type, the video is directly streamed from AWS when a user watches it.

Answer

For AWS we generate a so-called “presigned URL”

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/ShareObjectPreSignedURL.html

to grant time-constrained permission to access the video. The access time is limited to the video duration + one hour. This may make it necessary to refresh the page in order to watch the video (again), if the validity of the link has been exceeded.

In order to be able to watch the video, the user needs Internet access (e.g. via a proxy) on his or her client device.

As we are using a presigned URL, there are no further requirements for the configuration of the S3 bucket. For example, you do not need to enable public access for the S3 bucket in order to use it for Videos for Confluence.