Amazon IVS Playback Restriction Policies

Overview

Live streaming opens doors to a global audience, but managing who sees your content can be tricky. That’s where Amazon IVS steps in, and their recent update empowers you like never before. Introducing Playback Restriction Policies, a powerful tool that grants you granular control over who accesses your live streams. With Amazon IVS, you can easily create, manage, and deliver live streams for various use cases. In this blog post, we will look closely at Amazon IVS playback restriction policies. We will discuss what they are, how they work, and how you can use them to protect your live streams.

Introduction

One of the challenges with live streaming is ensuring that your content is only seen by the people who are authorized to see it. This is where Amazon IVS playback restriction policies come in.

You can restrict access based on a variety of factors, such as:

• Origin:You can restrict access to viewers from specific countries or regions.
• Device:You can restrict viewer access on specific devices, such as mobile devices or smart TVs.
• Referrer:You can restrict access to viewers who visit your live stream from a specific website or referrer.

With playback restriction policies, you can:

• Safeguard copyrighted content:You can use playback restriction policies to prevent unauthorized access to your live streams, such as those that contain copyrighted content.
• Adhere to regulation:You can use playback restriction policies to comply with regulations restricting access to certain content in certain regions.
• Enhance viewer experience:You can use playback restriction policies to improve the quality of experience for your viewers by restricting access to viewers who are on poor-quality connections or in regions with high latency.

Step-by-Step Guide

Let’s get started with Amazon IVS Playback Restriction Policies with Hands-on demonstration.

1. Create restriction policy: To create a restriction policy, navigate to the Amazon IVS (Interactive Video Service) page on the console. Go to Playback security from the left panel -> Playback restriction policies and click Create policy.

Provide the name of your restriction policies. Under Allowed countries, add US (United States of America) and click on Create policy. In our example, we are only adding the US (United States of America) to the playback live stream, which means all other countries will be restricted.

Note: Under Allowed countries, add all available countries or the countries you want to allow playback.

Note: My current location is India, and we have only added US (United States of America) in Allowed countries, which restricts users in India.

2. Attach policy to Amazon IVS channel (new or existing): Once the playback restriction policy is created, creating a low-latency streaming channel is time. We can also use this policy with existing channels.

To set up a channel, provide the channel name and the following configurations:

• Channel configuration: Custom configuration
• Channel type: Basic
• Video latency: low latency

In the Restrict playback section, select Enable playback restriction. From the Playback restriction policy drop-down, select the policy we created in the previous step. Finally, click Create channel.

Upon the channel creation, we can send a live stream to our Amazon IVS channel using software like the OBS studio and the stream configuration credentials available on the channel page.

We can verify that our playback restriction policy works as the live stream cannot be previewed in the channel. It shows a message that the Preview is unavailable due to playback restriction.

To preview the live stream playback, let’s add India to the allowed countries. To do so, navigate the restriction policy, click Edit, add India to Allowed countries, and save the changes.

Attempt to preview the live stream playback once more; this time, it won’t restrict the preview for users located in India.

In this demo, we saw a simple way to apply a playback restriction policy and set it up in just a few minutes. Remember to remove unnecessary resources like channels and restriction policies once they’re no longer needed.

Pricing

There is no additional cost to use Amazon IVS playback restriction policies. However, there are some charges associated with using Amazon IVS. For more pricing information, please visit the Amazon IVS website.

Conclusion

Amazon IVS Playback Restriction Policies empower customers with greater control, security, and efficiency in their live streaming endeavors. They are easy to use and can be configured to meet your needs. Amazon IVS playback restriction policies are a great option to protect your live streams.

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