-- AWS announces five AWS Media Services for complete video workflows --
Tue, 28 Nov 2017 11:16
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AWS announced five AWS Elemental Media Services, an integrated suite of services that make it easy for video providers of all kinds to create reliable, flexible, and scalable video offerings in the cloud.
Based on AWS Elemental video solutions, these five new cloud services let customers build end-to-end workflows for both live and on-demand video with the professional features, image quality, and reliability needed to deliver premium video experiences to viewers across a multitude of devices. With just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can build customised video applications and pay only for the technology resources they use, without upfront capital investment.
Whether for entertainment, sports, news, education, community engagement, or corporate alignment, consumers today expect great video experiences delivered securely and reliably to any device including tablets, smart phones, connected TVs, or set-top boxes. Previously, to meet these high expectations, video providers had to procure very expensive, specialised broadcast equipment that was inflexible, slow to adapt to new device platforms, hard to scale to meet times of peak demand, and often lacked support for the latest video formats, resolutions, and streaming techniques. What s more, if the video provider wanted to adopt new revenue- generating business models, such as personalised advertising to a global customer base, they needed to spend considerable time and effort making that work seamlessly across all devices.
AWS Elemental Media Services eliminate the need to procure expensive equipment for video data centres. These services automate what were previously complex, labor- intensive processes that manage on-going video operations. And, AWS Elemental Media Services let video providers avoid wasted infrastructure due to on-going technology obsolescence. With AWS Elemental Media Services, which combine the proven broadcast-quality video solutions from AWS Elemental with the security, durability, availability, and scalability of AWS, video providers can focus on making great content that is delivered via the cloud instead of building and maintaining on- premises video infrastructure. Projects that once took months or years such as standing up 24x7 live broadcast channels, converting a library of video-on-demand (VOD) assets for distribution, or streaming a high-profile live event can now be completed in a fraction of the time with AWS Elemental Media Services. Additionally, by using AWS Elemental Media Services, video providers can also incorporate personalised advertisements into streaming video using advanced techniques to generate additional revenues with their video content.
For the better part of six decades, professional-grade video workflows were limited to a few major industry players who could afford to build and maintain customised infrastructure that would be updated only once or twice each decade, said Alex Dunlap, general manager at AWS Elemental. These companies spent a great deal of time, money, and focus operating infrastructure with resources that could have been better spent creating great content and viewer experiences. We built AWS Elemental Media Services to let customers focus on delivering top-quality video reliably to any device, everywhere, without the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing infrastructure. This not only helps traditional video providers innovate faster, but it also opens up new opportunities for startups, government agencies, schools, and multinational enterprises that, before today, had limited access to premium-quality video technology.
AWS Elemental Media Services include the following individual services:
AWS Elemental MediaConvert: Format and compress video-on-demand content for delivery to virtually any playback device, with high-quality video transcoding and broadcast-level features.
AWS Elemental MediaLive: Encode broadcast-grade live video for televisions or connected devices. Quickly stand up broadcast channels or live events and deliver them reliably to your viewers.
AWS Elemental MediaPackage: Prepare and protect live video streams for delivery to Internet devices with rich playback experience features such as start-over TV.
AWS Elemental MediaStore: Deliver video from high-performance storage optimised for media.
AWS Elemental MediaTailor: Insert targeted advertising into your video without sacrificing quality to increase viewer engagement and boost revenues.
Customers involved in the extensive private preview of AWS Elemental Media Services provided the following feedback on the services:
BT is one of the world s leading communications services companies, serving customers in the UK and more than 170 countries. To power its next-generation video headend infrastructure which delivers video both to Internet-connected devices and traditional broadcast set-top boxes, BT is looking to leverage AWS. Rationalising our on-premises converged headend and extending that infrastructure widely across the BT enterprise requires an all-in shift to the cloud, said Ian Parr, director TV and Broadband Infrastructure for BT. AWS Elemental has played a key role in our TV and Sport platform evolution over the past few years. The new AWS Elemental Media Services are a natural extension of media workflows to the cloud. The ease of use of these AWS console-based services for end-to-end workflows will provide a level of flexibility and efficiency that will be a game changer for our industry while providing a flexible option that can coexist with legacy on-premises live and on-demand infrastructures deployments.
Every year, Pac-12 Networks offers live coverage of 850 sporting events, making it one of the top live sports producers in the Un
