All you need to know about AWS OTT video streaming solutions

AWS – OTT video streaming solutions

Over-the-top (OTT) video consumption is steadily rising, it’s estimated that the online streaming market will be worth more than $100 billion or more than that by the year 2025. OTT is a method of media content distribution that is an alternative to traditional satellite or cable television. This technology distributes media content via internet. Media is delivered and consumed via internet seamlessly.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) enables publishers and content owners to scale up their infrastructure to deliver live multimedia content.  Live Streaming on Amazon web services solution helps the client to build highly available live video streaming media content using AWS Media Services and Amazon CloudFront, both are highly flexible and secured enough to deliver real-time viewing experience to the end customers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides two significant over-the-top (OTT) live video streaming solutions which can deliver media content in the AWS Cloud. Both solutions are implemented with a highly robust architecture that delivers a reliable real-time viewing experience. They are as follows

• Live Streaming on AWS
• Live Streaming on AWS with MediaStore

Live Streaming on AWS with MediaStore:

The media inputs are ingested and transcoded for delivering high-quality Live Streaming videos. It ingests input media streams from the source and transcodes multimedia content into a single HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) with adaptive bit rate (ABR). It has large storage containers which are scalable and robust enough to host the larger volume of the encoded segments. The Amazon CloudFront is configured for the utilization of MediaStore custom endpoints as its source. AWS CF takes care of the delivery of the media content across the channels at the uncompromisable low latency and with high data transfer speeds.

An encoder such as AWS Elemental MediaConvert will be used to transcode the video into streaming formats. In on-demand video streaming, the media files will be stored in the Amazon S3 bucket which is infinitely scalable. Amazon CloudWatch dashboard monitors the entire entry and exit actions of the media contents on the MediaStore container. Hence the seamless video live streaming can be achieved without delays.

AWS CloudFormation launches the services (AWS Elemental MediaLive and AWS Elemental MediaStore) for video streaming. 

AWS Elemental Medialive is an advanced live video processing service on demand. This allows creating high-quality live streaming videos to broadcast televisions and internet-connected devices such as TVs, digital signage boards, smart TVs, Tablets, and smartphones. This service encodes the live videos which stream in real-time, basically, this takes the larger size videos from the video sources and compresses them into smaller compatible units, and distributes them across the devices. 

AWS Elemental Medialive channel receives the media content from the source and based on the output configuration it converts the redundant input media data into multiple compressed outputs. The videos will be delivered by the Amazon CloudFront and other CDNs to the output devices i.e. the multiple OTT devices which display the content to the recipient users.

Some of the examples of the Amazon Elemental Medialive services are broadcasting video streams on televisions for live games and 24/7 channels that broadcast news, reality shows, and events. The main advantage of this service is the implementation of a cost-effective broadcast-grade video processing infrastructure for live streaming the videos.  Simple deployment, High-grade broadcasting capabilities, increased efficiency, and easy to avail infrastructure with reduced cost are the major benefits of the Amazon Elemental MediaLive.

AWS Elemental MediaStore is an AWS storage service that optimizes the Media content. It manages the performance, consistency, and low latency needed for streaming video content. AWS Elemental MediaStore acts as the major component in the video streaming workflow. Its high-performance capabilities manage media delivery workloads, combined with long-term and profitable storage. It optimizes the streaming performance and provides the video to the CDNs without the buffering of the video and reduces the latency rate. Amazon EM scales the streaming based on the volume of the requests received.

Live streaming on AWS

The services offered here are the AWS elemental media package which provides a just-in-time packaging service that helps video providers with high security, reliability, and cost-effectiveness for packaging and delivering the live video stream.  AWS Elemental MediaPackage does not limit the end customers’ preferences of video players or Content delivery networks. It works seamlessly with other Amazon services to create high-quality solutions, resilient live streaming for 24/7 channels or live events. The supported video inputs are URL_PULL, RTMP_PUSH, RTMP_PULL, RTP_PUSH, and Media Connect inputs with redundancy. The supported output formats are CMAF, HLS, and DASH for playback support on different players. 

Along with the two OTT live video streaming solutions, Amazon offers Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) to create interactive videos. This is a managed live streaming solution that is easily configurable for implementing interactive video experiences. The user can send their live streams to Amazon IVS which broadcasts the media content at a low latency rate. This service is easy to use and the configuration/setup is done in a few steps in order to do the live video streaming, the audience experience is phenomenal due to the low-latency live video which is less than three seconds. It can be easily integrated with iOS, Android, web apps, and broadcast SDK for live streaming which provides excellent video quality without the increased buffering. One of the prime features of Amazon IVS is its Content security and protection. Media Content encryption is not possible in this solution where it provides a robust mechanism for accessing the channels securely by authorization of the playback Sessions.

Conclusion

We at TechAffinity, have extensive experience on AWS solutions with 10+ certified AWS architects who are well versed and worked on Amazon over the top video streaming solutions and its services. In the past, our team has implemented the AWS video streaming solutions on many of the web and mobile (android and iOS platforms) applications for our client’s projects which works seamlessly. Feel free to write an email to media@techaffinity.com or schedule a meeting with our experts to discuss your AWS needs.