Advanced Television

AWS reveals 5 Media Services

November 27, 2017

In a move that typifies how software company AWS Elemental is benefitting from being part of the broader Amazon Web Services operation and utilising the benefits of the Cloud, the company has revealed 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.

According to Keith Wymbs, CMO, the new services eliminate the need to procure expensive equipment for video data centres, automating what were previously complex, labour-intensive processes that manage on-going video operations.

“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 customized 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 start-ups, 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, the first three of which are newly-released by the company:

  • 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.

“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.”

AWS Elemental Media Services integrate seamlessly with other AWS services, allowing customers to augment their video workflows with offerings such as AWS Direct Connect and AWS Snowball for content ingestion; Amazon CloudFront for content delivery; Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring; and Amazon Rekognition for artificial intelligence.

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