AWS Media Services: Build a Scalable Media Platform in Cloud

Introduction to AWS Media Services

Online content creation, such as making one-minute reels on the social media platform to live video streaming podcasts, is rampant in the market today. Content creators are booming in the virtual world and constantly looking for easy-to-use, reliable, and innovative platforms to publish their content and make it go viral.

AWS Media Services Use Cases

The two typical use cases of AWS Media Services are:

1. 1. Video On Demand

VOD, or video-on-demand, is any content distribution platform that gives viewers the ability to choose when, where, and how they view media.

Example use cases of VOD:

1. 1. • Educational contents
      • User-Generated content
      • Broadcast contents
      • Advertisements and promotions
   2. Live Streaming

It is a way of delivering a video file a little bit at a time, often from a remote storage location or from a camera feed. By streaming a few seconds of the file at a time over the internet, client devices do not have to download the entire video before starting to play it.

Example use cases of Live streaming:

1. • 24×7 TV channels / News channel
   • Live events / Healthcare classes
   • Community channels / social gatherings
   • Live conferences

AWS Media Services

Under the Media service category, we have 8 AWS services that can be used for various workflows and needs. Let’s go through these services

1. AWS Elemental Media Connect — Reliable, secure, and flexible transport for live video.

AWS Elemental MediaConnect is a high-quality live video transport service. Today, broadcasters and content owners rely on satellite networks or fiber connections to transmit their contents into the cloud or transmit it to partners for distribution. Unfortunately, these approaches are expensive, require long times to set up, and lack the flexibility to adapt to changing requirements.
We get the reliability and security of satellite and fiber combined with the flexibility and economics of IP-based networks using AWS Elemental MediaConnect.

We can use MediaConnect to ingest the live video from a remote event location and share it with cable distributors or the AWS cloud to process the stream.

Here is a blog on Personalize Virtual Viewing Experience with AWS Elemental Link that can give you more insights.

2. AWS Elemental MediaConvert — Prepare file-based video assets for on-demand broadcast and multi-screen delivery

AWS Elemental MediaConvert is a file-based video transcoding service with broadcast-grade features. It helps us quickly to transcode the VOD contents for broadcast and multi-screen deliveries. It’s a managed service hence focusing on delivering the contents rather than the worry about video processing systems

3. AWS Elemental MediaLive — Convert inputs into live outputs for broadcast and multi-screen delivery

AWS Elemental MediaLive is a broadcast-grade live video processing service. We can deliver high-quality video streams to broadcasters, and internet-connected multi-screen devices. This service encodes the live video from the ground in real-time, where compressing larger source files into smaller versions for the viewer. It’s a managed service that features high availability

4. AWS Elemental MediaPackage — Package the live and on-demand contents with broadcast quality

AWS Elemental MediaPackage prepares and protects your video delivery over the internet. From a single source video input, AWS Elemental MediaPackage creates multiple video streams formatted to play on internet-connected devices. AWS Elemental MediaPackage can package the video into popular packagers like HLS, DASH ISO. This service also allows us to configure the Digital Right Management solution (DRM) to protect our contents from piracy

5. AWS Elemental MediaStore — store video assets for live and on-demand media

AWS Elemental MediaStore is an AWS service that is optimized for storing media assets. This provides us performance, consistency and low latency require to deliver the live streaming contents.

6. AWS Elemental MediaTailor — monetize multi-screen video contents with server-side ad insertion

AWS Elemental MediaTailor is a channel assembly and personalized ad insertion service for video providers to create linear OTT channels using existing content and use them to monetize those channels. Ads are stitched to the contents which helps in maximum monetization opportunities, and it helps to mitigate the adblockers

7. Amazon Interactive Video Service — Build an engaging live stream experience

Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) is a managed live streaming solution that is easy, quick, and ideal for creating interactive video experiences. We can customize the audience experience through AWS IVS player SDK and timed metadata API.

8. Amazon Kinesis Video Streams — capture, process, and store video stream for analytics and machine learning

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams helps in securely streaming video from the connected devices to AWS for analytics, machine learning, and other processing. It’s a managed service hence it will automatically provision and scale the infrastructure needs to ingest the streaming data from millions of devices.

Conclusion

I hope this blog gave you an insight on  AWS Media Service and its use cases in content creation, multi-format streaming, broadcasting, low latency streaming, and personalized advertisement domains. Live video streaming for music concerts and broadcasting videos to millions of people live and across social media platforms is popular in the market. The wide range of AWS Media Services are leveraged to reach a newer audience at a moment’s notice. These services are managed services that let you quickly build and adapt video workflows, eliminate capacity planning, quickly scale with growth, and benefit from pay-as-you-go pricing.

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Drop a query if you have any questions regarding AWS Media Services, Cloud Media Platform, or any AWS services, and we will get back to you quickly. To get started, go through our Expert Advisory page and Managed Services Package that is CloudThat’s offerings.