This topic provides answers to frequently asked questions about activating ApsaraVideo VOD.

Are Alibaba Cloud OSS and CDN automatically activated when I activate ApsaraVideo VOD?

No. When you use ApsaraVideo VOD, you may need to use the storage, transcoding, and CDN acceleration services. These services require the use of multiple types of resources. As an independent service, ApsaraVideo VOD provides a private Object Storage Service (OSS) bucket to store your videos, and automatically initiates and completes video transcoding. In addition, ApsaraVideo VOD accelerates content delivery based on the domain name for CDN that you provide. You do not need to activate other services such as OSS, ApsaraVideo Media Processing, and Alibaba Cloud CDN.

What are the differences between ApsaraVideo VOD and OSS?

In terms of definition:
  • ApsaraVideo VOD is an end-to-end solution for video collection, editing, and content management. You can use ApsaraVideo VOD to upload, transcode, and deliver content based on your business requirements.
  • OSS is a secure, cost-effective, and highly reliable service that can store large amounts of data.
In terms of functionality:
  • ApsaraVideo VOD mainly stores videos. The capability to store more types of media files such as audio is under development.
  • OSS stores various types of media assets, such as video files, audio files, images, DOC files, and PDF files. OSS can be considered as a cloud storage solution.
In terms of connection:
  • OSS can be used as an independent storage service, or can be connected to CDN to accelerate delivery of files that are stored in OSS. ApsaraVideo VOD serves as a hosting service for the audio and video files that you store in ApsaraVideo VOD to meet business requirements for on-demand videos. ApsaraVideo VOD also provides media management, video editing, content moderation and publishing, statistics, short video SDK, and video security.
  • ApsaraVideo VOD stores data in OSS buckets. However, the private bucket that ApsaraVideo VOD provides does not consume OSS resources. This means that you do not need to activate OSS. If you have activated OSS, you are unable to view or manage the ApsaraVideo VOD bucket in the OSS console. The private bucket is billed as a separate service.