AWS Elemental Takes Next Step Forward with Media Services Offering

AWS Elemental Takes Next Step Forward with Media Services Offering By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director

Sunday, November 26, 2017 - 3:05 am

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Amazon Web Services today launched five new AWS Elemental Media Services that are designed to better meet the needs of a video industry that is transforming via OTT, streaming, VOD, and other distribution methods. The goal is to offer up a suite of cloud-based services that make it easier for anyone wanting to serve up an OTT channel, VOD offering, or streaming service to do so. The convergence of video applications is happening across all markets, and while standards still have to be dealt with, Internet and mobile technologies are a unifying factor for today's video infrastructure, says Keith Wymbs, AWS Elemental, chief marketing officer. We want to bring our deep expertise in video to a wider audience in terms of applications, industries, and customer accessibility and doing so via the AWS Cloud will help customer to innovate more quickly at scale why being able to adjust to fluctuations in demand.

Keith Wymbs, AWS Elemental, CMO

The new suite includes five new service applications in the AWS Management Console, comprised of: AWS Elemental MediaLive (a real-time compression engine); AWS Elemental MediaConvert (for file-to-file transcoding); AWS Elemental MediaPackage (for just-in-time packaging and DRM); AWS Elemental MediaStore (optimized media origination); and, AWS Elemental MediaTailor (for comprehensive targeted service-side ad insertion analytics while also ensuring inserted ads match the quality of the content format).

The five services also integrate well with third-party DRM, CMS, MAM, OVP solutions, as well as other AWS Management Console services such as AWS CloudFormation, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon SNS, and Amazon CloudFront among others, adds Wymbs.

Looking at the five applications more deeply, MediaConvert can convert any video input source, ranging from high-quality studio masters to videos captured on a mobile device, and produce content ready for distribution to viewers. It also has broadcast-quality video features including static graphic overlays, audio loudness normalization, ad insertion via SCTE-35 support, manifest decoration, DRM integration, and broadcast and OTT closed captioning. It supports high-quality codecs like MPEG-2, AVC, HEVC including support for 10-bit 4:2:2 color sampling), has extensive adaptive bitrate packaging formats (HLS, MSS, DASH), and processing and conversion of HDR content (HDR 10 and HLG BT.2020).

MediaLive has similar format support and enables push-button deployment of live channels and handles resource provisioning, service orchestration, scaling, healing, resiliency failover, monitoring, and reporting. AWS Elemental says users can set up a channel in minutes as it does all the heavy lifting behind the scenes to provision and start the various resources required.

AWS Elemental MediaPackage, meanwhile, is designed to provide more flexibility compared to current CDN options for customizing content packages. It is CDN-agnostic so that a user can develop a multi-CDN strategy, it is available in multiple regions, and it also has third-party QOS tool integration with the likes of Conviva or Cedexis. It also offers highly customizable packaging options and parameters, providing flexibility for streaming protocols (including including HLS, DASH, RTMP, and RTP), segment sizes, manifest manipulation, and metadata handling, along with broad DRM support. For example, it can record all the renditions in an adaptive bitrate (ABR) stream and supports up to 4K resolution with high frame rate using HEVC, while other cloud services restrict recordings to only the highest bitrate.

MediaStore, meanwhile, provides media-specific best practices for object storage without the challenges of complex implementation and management, so customers can focus on their workflow rather than worrying about their storage infrastructure. AWS Elemental MediaStore customers can see a unified view of available object storage tiers and realize the benefits of better security management and performance. For example, when a video file is written to AWS Elemental MediaStore, it is automatically held in a replicated cache for the first few minutes after creation, and again after each update. This replicated cache gives great performance, even with the high request loads and with the frequent updates common with video files.

And finally, MediaTailor makes it easier to integrate advertising. The same video processing pipeline is used for both content and ads which removes the need for complicated ad signaling between servers and a single ad insertion network can be used for multiple consumer devices. It also offers improved client-side viewing metrics as it does not require specific player or SDK integration to work.

AWS Media Services can function as standalone services or within larger video workflows. AWS Media Services are a family of services that form the foundation of cloud-based video workflows, which offer customers the capabilities they need to create, package, and deliver video, all accessible through the AWS Management Console and APIs. Working together with other AWS services, AWS Media Services offer a complete solution for processing and delivery of live or on-demand video content to viewers around the world.

AWS Elemental sees three primary reasons for the company to bring video processing and delivery to the cloud. First, the same AWS services that video providers have become familiar with to construct IT workflows can now integrate with AWS-built video processing and delivery services that didn't exist before. Second, the limitations imposed by rigid, costly data center video architecture have been stripped away and replaced with flexible, pay-as-you-go, elas

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