AWS Media Services- A Guide to Video Streaming

The popularity of videos is on the rise among internet users because they offer a captivating viewing experience. Over 3 billion people worldwide watch entertaining or informational videos per month. Therefore, if a content creator or video publisher is looking to boost engagement and revenue, video streaming is a perfect way.

Here, delivering live and on-demand videos to the viewers is a complex task that requires professional-grade AWS streaming services. In this blog, we will cover what video streaming is, some of these media services offered by AWS, and which platform you can choose for these services.

What is AWS Media Services?

These are the cloud-based media services offered by AWS to help businesses elevate their operations using cloud technology. It helps in storing, processing, delivering, and monetizing videos to address various aspects of media workflows.

\These media services are well-known among content creators and video publishers as they enable them to build live and on-demand video workflow. Using these services, it becomes easy to create and deliver live and on-demand videos.

Top 7 AWS Media Services

Amazon IVS

Launched in 2020, Amazon IVS allows a content creator to stream interactive live videos around the globe in FHD quality or 1080p. This live stream video solution is also known for handling the ingestion, transcoding, and video content delivery.

Amazon IVS is a managed live streaming solution that enables content creators and video publishers to stream live videos at low latency (2 to 3 seconds). It enables content creators to empower content creators to provide an engaging live video viewing experience. It gives the content creators confidence that their viewers will get the best possible viewing experience as Amazon IVS handles everything from ingestion to content delivery.

Benefits

• In-built Broadcast SDK to provide the best possible experience to viewers.
• Engaging audience experiences using scalable stream chat rooms along with video streams.
• IVS offers the collaborative live streaming opportunity to allow up to 12 streamers to pull their audiences into one live stream.
• Frustration-free scaling of interactive live streaming events that can support up to 10,000 viewers.
• Save live videos in Amazon S3 and stream them later as Video on Demand (VOD).

Use Cases

• Chat rooms play a vital role in allowing the audiences to get the best experiences. It has a moderation option that enables it to accompany a live streaming video.
• Businesses can easily build robust transmission with Amazon IVS by running live auctions using real-time streaming.
• Content creators can easily get instant feedback directly from audiences with polling. Moreover, it is also useful to build voting apps using timed metadata.
• Apps development to bring multiple streamers (up to 12) in a single live video to multiply their audiences with collaborative live streams. 

Also Read: Amazon IVS: Definition, Benefits, Use Cases and Key Features 

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a top choice among content creators as it uses edge locations close to the user’s location to deliver content quickly. In simple words, a CDN is a globally distributed group of servers that helps by caching video content closest to the end user. This reliable content delivery service levels up the speed of delivering video content.

Low-latency content delivery network (CDN) to deliver video content worldwide at high data transfer speed. It was designed to enable content creators and video publishers to securely deliver content using 550+ Points of Presence (PoPs). This global content delivery network works on user requests and retrieves the data stored on Amazon S3.

Benefits

• CloudFront uses 216 edge locations that are located worldwide to enable end-users to access and use content at low latency.
• This CDN uses a layered security perimeter to avoid multiple types of attacks like DDoS.
• The customized pricing option is one of the leading benefits of CloudFront, including pay-as-you-go.
• Automatically scale to handle multiple requests simultaneously without affecting performance.

Use Cases

• Video content delivery across the globe in real-time with field-level encryption and data compression.
• CloudFront optimizes dynamic content delivery with the purpose-built AWS network infrastructure.
• Streaming live or on-demand videos in HD or FHD quality to any device to global viewers.
• CloudFront is well-known for automatically scaling and delivering software and IOT updates with high transfer speed.

Also Read: Which is the Best Alternative to Cloudflare for Content Delivery

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is a public cloud storage built to retrieve any amount of data at any time. This storage service is well-known because it enables industry-leading scalability, security, and performance. Content creators and video publishers can store and secure their crucial data for their use. S3 helps to provide the management features to optimize, organize, and configure data access.

Here, data is stored inside S3 buckets in separate units known as objects. These buckets are similar to file folders that are useful to store, retrieve, and access objects. These simple storage service buckets are used to help individuals and enterprises meet their data usage, backup, and delivery in the cloud.

Benefits

• Amazon S3 provides logging and monitoring tools that help in monitoring how S3 resources are used.
• S3 enables its users to access highly scalable, fast, and expensive data storage infrastructure.
• Cloud enables content creators and video publishers to only use the required storage.
• Optimize storage classes and manage data transfer in the most suitable way.

Use Cases

• Performance big data analytics, AI, ML and operate HPC applications to gain data insights.
• Back up crucial data in the Amazon S3 bucket and restore the data anytime.
• Securely store multimedia data for a long time and lower its cost by moving it to the S3 Glacier Storage Class.
• Build fast and reliable cloud-native apps for mobile & website that scale automatically.

AWS Elemental MediaTailor

MediaTailor is a linear channel assembly service that permits ad insertion. With its help, content creators and video publishers can monetize their OTT channels using personalized ads. It is well-known as it allows content creators to insert ads dynamically based on the preferences and demographics of the users.

MediaTailor ad-insertion service supports HLS and MPEG DASH to enable video on demand and live workflows. This service helps in target-based advertising to enhance audience engagement.

Benefits

• Superior video viewing experience by reducing buffering between program content and ad breaks.
• Handle a large number of concurrent viewers making it ideal for both live and on-demand video streaming.
• With MediaTailor, a content creator or video publisher can reduce infrastructure costs by managing the ads.
• Works perfectly both independently (deploy on its own) and with other AWS media services (use built-in integration).

Use Cases

• Broadcast a live channel using the existing VOD library in a cost-efficient manner using channel assembly.
• Get accurate ad view metrics without any risk of losing revenue. This includes server-side reporting.
• Insert personalized ads into new streams distributed across various platforms.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert

AWS Elemental MediaConvert is a video transcoding service that helps to process video files and prepares them for on-demand video content. It helps in producing high-quality video output with broadcast-grade audio and video features. Here, content creators and video publishers are only required to pay based on the duration of the video processed and the features used.

MediaConvert helps to convert video content libraries of any size to allow broadcasting and streaming. It uses cloud-based transcoding which helps to focus only on delivering media experiences to the users. Moreover, it helps content creators to worry less about maintaining video processing infrastructure.

Benefits

• Creation of engaging video viewing experiences for the users like graphics overlays, content protection, etc.
• Automate the task of creating and managing the video infrastructure with automated resource provisioning.
• Supports a wide range of video formats that allow a content creator or video publisher to transcode video into the format that best suits the requirements.
• Content creators can select from on-demand pricing, reserved pricing, or a combination of these two.

Use Cases

• Development of video highlights with AI and ML to generate relevant clips of a live event.
• High-quality video generation using quality-defined variable bitrate or QVBR without any human intervention.
• Prepare FHD or 4K videos for OTT content delivery to create both SDR and HDR videos.

AWS Elemental MediaLive

AWS Elemental MediaLive is a broadcast-grade live or real-time video processing service. It enables the content creator or video publisher to create high-quality streams for users around the globe. This service allows content creators to set up and deploy live channels within minutes.

This service enables a content creator to encode videos in real-time by compressing live sources into high-quality streams. MediaLive is available to use either as an individual service or by integrating with other AWS media services.

Benefits

• MediaLive supports the latest codecs, including H.364 and H.265. Moreover, it also supports the media communication protocols like RTMP, RTP, HLS, etc.
• Every created live video channel with MediaLive runs on a redundant infrastructure for auto scalability of live videos.
• This service offers pay-as-you-go pricing for both input and output of live videos.
• Manage the video encoding resources to deliver live video streams through encoding infrastructure.

Use Cases

• Transfer HD videos to MediaLive for content delivery to the viewers with portable AWS elemental link HD or UHD.
• Dynamically switch videos by creating input-switching actions as required.
• Automatically create and deploy live channels using the AWS development kit.

AWS Elemental MediaPackage

AWS Elemental MediaPackage prepares and distributes video content worldwide. It helps in the protection and distribution of content to a wide range of devices. MediaPackage helps automatically manage resources across multiple availability zones. It is an origination and packaging service of video to reliably deliver streaming at scale according to the audience’s demand.

MediaPackage helps in delivering high-quality video content and makes it easier to implement DVR features. These features include start, play, pause, and rewind. Also, it helps to protect content with DRM.

Benefits

• Deliver video content to viewers located worldwide on their playback devices.
• Secure premium videos with a just-in-time (JIT) content protection method.
• Automatic scaling of videos according to the stream requests a content creator receives.
• This service can also be used with other AWS media services due to its easy integration feature.

Use Cases

• Real-time video viewing experience with multiple AWS media services and Amazon CloudFront.
• Support efficient management of content delivery across many MediaPackage origins.
• Through CDN authentication with MediaPackage, it prevents media content from unauthorized users.

Conclusion

These are the top 7 AWS media services that enable a content creator or video publisher to stream videos in HD, FHD, or UHD quality. With the help of these services, a content creator can stream interactive videos. To get these services at the most discounted price and offers, opt for VideoCrypt which is a go-to video streaming platform that enables a content creator or video publisher to build video workflows. It is India’s preferred AWS elemental media services partner to enable content creators to stream live or on-demand videos securely with accelerated content delivery.