It's been about a year since we launched Lullabot Learning Series Drupal tutorial videos with the release of Learning CCK and Learning Views. We now have 8 videos in the series with more soon on the way.

While the videos are packaged as DVDs, we also sell them as high-definition video files for download. Since there are no shipping/packaging costs and since the downloads are immediate, the download option has been very popular.

Many of these videos contain over 3 hours of high-definition video and their file sizes easily can be in excess of 2GB. So it's been a challenge finding a video download mechanism which can balance reliability and speed along with integration with our store's Ubercart-based ecommerce system.

Today I'm proud to announce that we've moved our downloads to Amazon's CloudFront content delivery network (CDN) and in our tests we're seeing download speeds as much as 4 times faster than before. And since this is a global CDN with delivery points around the world, users outside of North America should see even higher speed increases.

Just this morning I downloaded Site Building With Drupal and I was getting constant speeds over 2MB/sec through my Comcast service and wireless-N connection. VERY fast!

Users may still be limited by their ISP while downloading these large files. We have a FAQ item with some best practices for downloading. But most users should now be able to get Lullabot videos much faster.