AWS Elemental Blog

4K 4Charity Fun Run Portland

Alyssa — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 17:26:57 +0000

Get ready to cross the finish line for a good cause as the fifth annual 4K 4Charity PDX Fun Run and walk returns to Portland, Oregon this fall. In 2018, 4K 4Charity PDX registrants and sponsors raised more than $114,000 to support two local nonprofits, and we need your help to make an even greater impact this year. It only takes a few moments to spread the word about the event via email, text, tweet or to share on Facebook and Instagram, to encourage your friends, family, and colleagues to register. Continue reading for more information about the event or visit our website.

This year’s fifth anniversary race in Portland will be hosted on Thursday, October 3 at 3:00pm in Tom McCall Waterfront Park. For the third year in a row, all proceeds from the 4K 4Charity Fun Run in Portland will benefit Rosemary Anderson High School and KairosPDX. Both organizations are dedicated to delivering high-quality, equitable education to underserved youth in the Portland area. Proceeds from the 4K 4Charity will provide funding to help continue programming, purchase supplies, and retain teaching staff. Sponsorships and donations are currently being accepted and event registration is open.

The 4km (2.49-mile) out-and-back course is family-friendly, ADA-accessible, and runs along Tom McCall Waterfront Park, with the start and finish line located near the Burnside Bridge. Join us after the run to celebrate with music, snacks, craft beverages, and activities. 100% of proceeds from registration and on-line contributions are donated to our beneficiaries.

Whether you’re a competitive runner or prefer a leisurely stroll, the 4K 4Charity Fun Run makes it easy for participants and sponsors to get active and give back. To register for an upcoming event or find more information, visit: https://4k4charity.com/. We hope to see you at the starting line this October!

4K 4Charity Events Around the World Race to the Finish Line

Alyssa — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 16:36:45 +0000

It’s time to get moving! Please join the nearly 10,000 people who have supported the 4K 4Charity Fun Run and taken an estimated 46 million steps to making positive change across our industry.

The 4K 4Charity Fun Run returns to IBC 2019, hosted on Saturday, September 14 at 7:30am in Amstelpark, Amsterdam. Proceeds raised through the event will benefit Technovation, a global education non-profit that empowers underrepresented young people to become innovators and leaders through engineering and technology. To register, visit: https://4k4charity.com/ibc

Now in its sixth year, this fun run/walk offers show attendees a healthy alternative to traditional networking while helping drive more equity for those people who are underrepresented across the tech industry. To date, 4K 4Charity Fun Run events around the world have raised more than $1 million in overall proceeds. One hundred percent of individual contributions from each event are donated directly to designated nonprofit beneficiaries.

Founded in 2014, the 4K 4Charity Fun Run Series is a 2.49-mile running and walking event held annually to raise awareness and financial support for global and local non-profits that support increased diversity and inclusion initiatives. 4K 4Charity events are also scheduled for SMPTE 2019 in Los Angeles and NAB 2020 in Las Vegas. The SMPTE run/walk will be hosted on October 23 in Elysian Park, with more details to come. Stay tuned for additional updates!

VIDEO: Kayo Sports Delivers Rich User Experiences with AWS

James — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 22:16:16 +0000

Kayo Sports offers Australia’s sports fans a massive selection of more than 50 live sports powered by FOX SPORTS Australia, ESPN, and beIN SPORTS. Watch to learn how Kayo Sports uses AWS services for media, compute, storage, and analysis to deliver 30,000 hours of live content and rich interactive user experiences.

Giving Sports Fans A Cloud-Based Experience

Alyssa — Wed, 15 May 2019 20:40:35 +0000

With consumer adoption of OTT services and viewing of live sporting events on mobile devices at an all-time high, content creators and distributors are working hard to fine-tune their infrastructures and workflows to meet demand. For many, this has meant leveraging the flexibility and scalability of cloud-based computing and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered services, which require less capital cost and facilitate experimentation with new channels and mobile-first services.

At the recent 2019 NAB Show, a keynote panel, “Beyond the Field: How Sports Pioneers are Powering the 360 Audience Experience in the Cloud” brought together several leading media companies to discuss their strategies for servicing sports fans across multiple delivery platforms.

Moderated by Cynthia Frelund, the NFL’s first analytic expert, the panel included Stephanie Lone, Senior Vice President, Engineering, CBS Sports Digital; Rafael Soltanovich, Vice President, Software Development, Hulu; Scott Sonnenberg, Chief Global Partnerships Officer, L.A. Clippers; and Mark Kramer, Vice President, Engineering & Technology, Pac-12 Networks. These leaders share a key and common goal: provide fans a great experience driven by reliable and highly targeted content delivery—giving customers access to video and data services on their terms.

Frelund kicked off the discussion, reflecting on how a lot of professional sports teams in the U.S. now use cloud-based analytics and AI to help them better understand their own team’s tendencies -- and how they can use that to do better against their opponents. This same data-driven concept has swept the content world as well, helping media companies produce and deliver content more efficiently and with better accuracy.

“The NFL pioneered next-gen stats with AWS, so it's pretty cool to see these relational GPS data points being put together that help us tell deeper stories,” Frelund said, adding that she writes her own code using AWS tools. “For me, it’s all about the why and the storytelling. We’re starting to get deeper and deeper answers and the reason why is because we are looking at data in new and interesting ways.”

CBS Sports Digital’s Lone, who is in charge of engineering for all of the network’s online sports platforms (including the newly launched CBS Sports HQ streaming service), talked about CBS Sports’ live stream of Super Bowl LIII on February 3, 2019. She said the digital stream set viewership records, including 7.5 million unique devices, which was 20 percent higher than last year, with viewers consuming more than 560 million total minutes of live game coverage, up 19% from last year. The average minute audience of 2.6 million viewers during the game window was also up 31% year-over-year.

“CBS only gets to stream the Super Bowl every three years,” she said. “In 2017, the focus was on the desktop experience. This time we had the rights to mobile. We looked at all of our platforms and made sure they had failover options so that they were as reliable as the linear broadcast. Consumers don't care about packets or how they get the feed; they only care that they don’t want to miss a touchdown. Period.”

To make this experience a great one for fans, Lone and her team created an entirely new playbook which incorporated AWS services, including AWS Elemental MediaStore, a storage service optimized for media that provides the performance, consistency, and low latency required to deliver live streaming video content.

“We stream 35,000 live events per year and we would not be able to do that without the AWS Cloud and its ability to scale,” Lone said. “We also have 24/7 live channels that we need to support. In the beginning of 2018 we basically started from scratch and said ‘we’re going to build everything natively in the cloud, because there’s no way to buy that much hardware and infrastructure to keep up with that many events.’ And, by the way, we had to have it all done in seven months with a limited budget.”

Her team took a step-by-step approach and created a hybrid cloud/on-premise infrastructure for the Super Bowl, applying cloud services everywhere it made sense.

“We worked with AWS and their (AWS) Elemental encoders … they made an HLS output-locking feature for us so we could have multiple redundant streams,” Lone said. “And we could literally seamlessly switch from stream to stream and the consumer would never see any latency, lag or buffering.” CBS Sports Digital also employed the AWS Direct Connect service, as Lone notes, “…we had ‘direct connects’ from (AWS) Elemental Live encoders into multiple MediaStore regions, and this is where AWS features like disaster recovery really helped make the consumer experience so good.”

As Vice President, Software Development for Hulu, Rafael Soltanovich is responsible for all of the services and technology that power consumer experiences. The OTT service provider added live sports content in 2017 and, according to Soltanovich, it has seen subscribers increase significantly.

“No TV service is complete without live sports,” he said. “And we can't compete in sports without the cloud.”

Soltanovich spoke about the importance of AWS in allowing them to easily and predictably scale up capacity for large sporting events, particularly NFL football, then scale back down when the demand subsides.

“The cloud shines for scaling,” he said. “The thing we have learned about live services is that fans like live sports, but they love football. Our concurrent peak streams during football games are the most we experience for any event. So, we had to get good at serving up the games live in a hurry. It’s one thing to run a live event online that you can prepare for and scale. It’s another thing entirely to run a linear channel where you may have a program where only 10 or 50,000 people are watching and then you switch to a Super Bowl where millions are watching in a split second. It’s a challenge.”

So, how do you plan for that? At Hulu they use mathematical analysis and AWS to forecast what the usage of an upcoming live event is going to be. The company now does that on a weekly basis and, Soltanovich said, can reliably predict what the viewership is going to be for any one event.

“We’ve gotten good enough that in the last year that we typically come within five percent of determining the actual concurrent usage that occurs,” he said. “Beyond that, working closely with AWS and our systems, we’re able to pressure test them on a weekly basis so that at any given time we are able to scale to five times the peak or ten times the peak. And the numbers have been growing significantly. If you compare the Super Bowl, the number of concurrent users we saw was four times what it was last year. And we expect that number to continue to increase.”

Scott Sonnenberg said that the L.A. Clippers’ owner, Steve Ballmer, is “all-in” on using AWS and Amazon artificial intelligence services to give fans an exclusive experience within the basketball arena and at home. In an L.A. Clippers video shown during the panel discussion, Ballmer noted: “There’s such an opportunity to change the way people experience sports by using technology. What if we could actually diagram what plays are going on because they can recognize it in real time? What if we could show the probability of a shot going in?”

The team recently launched Clippers CourtVision, powered by AWS technology, which allows fans to do just that and a lot more. Clippers CourtVision lets viewers switch between different cameras angles and audio options, watch three Modes with different and unique live, augmented graphical overlays and access on-demand content. Fans can personalize their experience on their mobile device or computer via Mascot Mode, which features animated graphics and pop-ups; Coach Mode, which shows plays diagrammed on their screen in real time and Player Mode, which overlays statistics and real-time probabilities over live game action. These features are made possible by cameras that have been installed in the ceiling of all NBA arenas that capture the action from above. AWS machine learning and data analytics services advance the analyses and drive the Clippers CourtVision experience.

“We rely on AWS to help guide us as to what our fans are interested in,” Sonnenberg said. “We believe Clippers CourtVision will change the way sports will be watched. It gives you a lot of options. We have an owner that challenges us to improve the experience both inside the stadium and for consumers at home or on the go. We’re starting with the Clippers but a lot of teams are interested in this technology because it helps tell the story of the game in much more detail.”

Finally, Mark Kramer of Pac-12 Networks spoke about the use of AWS services for reducing his content creation and delivery costs, and providing new kinds of viewing experiences across a wide range of collegiate sports. Pac-12 Networks has pioneered the “At-Home” remote production model, in which much of the signal processing happens in the cloud.

“Our mission is to connect fans to the universities and sports that they love,” Kramer said. “And we do that by broadcasting 850 live events each year on our seven linear networks and in our TV everywhere Pac-12 Now app. We also do hundreds of digital-only events. It’s a lot more sports than football.”

Using AWS services allows Pac-12 Networks to turn channels or events on and off without having to worry about capital expense, he said. Along with traditional video production equipment on the ground, Pac-12 Networks currently uses a number of AWS services to package and distribute content to conference fans. These include Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Elemental MediaTailor, AWS Elemental MediaLive, AWS Elemental MediaPackage, and AWS Elemental MediaConnect (which Kramer said he really likes because it allows them to push one mezzanine stream to multiple end points, thus getting more content to more people faster).

Kramer added: “We don’t see video as video. We see video as data.”

iSportsAnalysis Takes Athletic Performance Analysis into the Cloud with AWS

Alyssa — Thu, 09 May 2019 22:40:13 +0000

Technological innovations have taken sports performance analytics into a new stratosphere. Sports organizations, coaches, and players can now easily access a host of tools to more effectively evaluate and improve player and team performance. Leading sports performance software provider iSportsAnalysis addresses some of the most pressing analytics challenges that sports clubs face today.

The iSports Analysis service creates a synchronized set of XML data along with a video asset to provide sports organizations with a robust game analysis toolset. Recently, iSportsAnalysis moved its solution from on premises to the cloud with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), electing to also use AWS Media Services for video transcoding and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for greater efficiency and elasticity.

With a background in corporate streaming, iSportsAnalysis quickly garnered interest from sports organizations looking to analyze performance during games and matches. As analytics fever caught on in sports, more of the company’s clients began asking for a way to combine live footage with analysis. Working closely with universities and sports clubs, the company developed a tool to tag possessions and other stats called “Sports Performance Analysis” which was designed to integrate with third-party analysis tools.

iSportsAnalysis CEO Anadi Taylor then began to envision a more cost-effective solution to meet the increasing demand. Drawing on his background in programming and live streaming, he studied existing solutions, identified gaps in functionality, and interviewed coaches, sport scientists, and analysts to uncover their specific needs. The resulting solution, iSportsAnalysis, has been used in real-time matches since 2017. Since then, Taylor and his team have continued to refine the solution, adding an online messaging system, synchronized video and analysis, filtering options, playlist generation, and more.

Taylor migrated iSportsAnalysis into the AWS Cloud from a rented server. Commenting on the experience, he shared, “Transferring to running Amazon EC2 instances was easy and super-fast; I was ready to go in a few hours. We even moved our transcoding over to AWS Elemental MediaConvert and I’ve never looked back. I also love that AWS tools give us the ability to regularly bring new features to our clients.”

iSportsAnalysis also migrated from a MySQL database service, hosted on Amazon EC2, to using Amazon Aurora. “The transition was incredibly smooth and the backup functionality, failure detection, and scalability has proved invaluable, let alone the time savings," Taylor added.

Today, iSportsAnalysis clients—whether coaches, players, or other sports professionals—log into an online administrative dashboard to get a customized view of their video footage and associated data. They can easily upload new videos, which are then stored in an S3 bucket. From there, content is transcoded to a unified video file format and specified resolution using AWS Elemental MediaConvert. Users can then tag or code the video and generate an in-depth data set that is linked back to the processed asset. The way in which the technology pairs data with video makes it simpler for users to search each video and identify key moments that may provide insight as to how players and teams can improve their performance.

Looking to the future, iSportsAnalysis plans to increase the use of AWS Media Services, along with the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN) to allow coaches and players to stream game footage with analytics to any connected device, making it faster and easier to improve game strategy as well as individual performance.

AWS Media Solutions at NAB Show 2019

James — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 19:49:12 +0000

With more than 90,000 attendees from 160 countries, the 2019 NAB Show again attracted media and entertainment professionals from across the world to interact with the people and tools that will propel the industry forward. AWS was there to share insights, strategies, and technologies to help content providers create innovation and opportunity from their broadcast and streaming video workflows. Among the highlights:

New solutions in action

The AWS booth hosted more than 20 demonstrations spanning the media supply chain from content creation through content distribution. Among the most requested demos was Accelerated Transcoding, a new feature in AWS Elemental MediaConvert that increases the processing speed of file-based video encoding jobs by up to 25 times. The demo also incorporated Quality-Defined Variable Bitrate (QVBR) control to visualize how AWS helps lower storage and transfer costs for VOD workflows while delivering consistent video quality.

Another new demo showed how AWS can reduce live video latency to ultra-low, better-than-broadcast levels. Taking advantage of new chunked object transfer functionality, AWS Elemental MediaStore and Amazon CloudFront anchored an end-to-end live streaming workflow that achieved consistent sub-four-second latency from source to screen.

Also demonstrated at NAB was SPEKE, the Secure Packager and Encoder Key Exchange developed by AWS as an open standard that simplifies content protection for video. AWS Elemental on-premises and cloud solutions at NAB employed SPEKE to enable seamless integration with DRM key servers.

On-demand conference sessions

AWS participated in a number of educational sessions at NAB, some of which are available for on demand viewing:

In Beyond the Field: How Sports Pioneers are Powering the 360 Audience Experience in the Cloud, NFL.com analytics expert Cynthia Frelund and an expert panel discussed how next-generation media workflows can create enhanced, customized experiences for sports fans. Sharing insights are sports media leaders Stephanie Lone, Senior Vice President, Engineering, CBS Sports Digital; Rafael Soltanovich, Vice President, Software Development, Hulu; Scott Sonnenberg, Chief Global Partnerships Officer, LA Clippers; and Mark Kramer, Vice President, Engineering and Technology, Pac-12 Networks. Watch on demand.

On the NAB Live Stage, Jason Fotter, co-founder and CTO of FuseFX joined Thomas Phariss of AWS Thinkbox to discuss the rapidly evolving state of the art in visual effects and the speed and scale afforded by cloud-based rendering solutions. To watch the AWS Thinkbox session, start the video at 05:01:25.

A plethora of partners

Twelve technology partners set up demo stations in the AWS booth with solutions that help create, protect, distribute, and monetize media streaming video content, joined by more than 40 Amazon Partner members across the NAB show floor. Featured partners were Accedo, Arc Publishing, Accurate Player by Codemill, Deluxe, Grabyo, GrayMeta, Reach Engine by Levels Beyond, Meta, Piksel, Overcast HQ, Veset, and Vidispine.

Industry recognition

AWS was honored to receive three awards during NAB: Video Edge recognized AWS Elemental MediaConnect and SPEKE with Best of Show awards, and TV Technology also awarded MediaConnect with Best of Show. SPEKE was also recognized as a finalist by IABM in the Publish category as a part of the Broadcast and Media (BaM) awards presented at NAB Show.

4K 4Charity breaks the million dollar mark

More than 500 participants from across the industry started their Tuesday at Sunset Park in Las Vegas for the fifth annual 4K 4Charity Fun Run benefiting global non-profit Girls Who Code. With participant and sponsor support, 4K 4Charity surpassed $1 million in lifetime funds raised for its non-profit partners!

On Demand: Dive Deep into Resilient Live Workflows

Alyssa — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 21:57:14 +0000

Sports and other live video content attracts viewers, creates revenue opportunities, and can play an important part in building loyal audiences. For content providers, getting the most out of investments in live streaming video means establishing workflows and processes that ensure an uninterrupted, high-quality experience for viewers on their preferred screen.

To keep you up to date on the latest solutions for reliable live video, AWS produced a three-part webcast series that dives deep into technologies and best practices that simplify the work of building and maintaining resilient live streaming workflows. Click here to register and watch any of the following webcasts on demand:

The Fundamentals of Building a Resilient Live Channel explores the details of real-world video workflows with a focus on issues that impact reliability, plus strategies for redundancy and monitoring to achieve broadcast-grade resilience. AWS experts discuss solutions for resilient content contribution, transcoding, packaging, and content delivery;

Advanced Workflows for Resilient Live Video Streaming addresses strategies for deploying AWS Media Services in different regions, and setting up failover that can span across AWS Regions. This session also covers other approaches to achieving resilience, such as content contribution with AWS Elemental MediaConnect and input switching for disaster recovery with AWS Elemental MediaLive;

Operationalize & Monitor Your Live Video Workflow illustrates how users can set up an end-to-end monitoring system using the Media Services Application Mapper (MSAM) solution, which automatically provisions the services necessary to visualize cloud media services, their relationships, and the real-time status of linear video services.

For more presentations from AWS media experts, you can search our full library of webcasts and online conferences.

EPIX Wins Media Excellence Award for 4K Ultra HD Streaming Feature Powered By AWS

Alyssa — Mon, 08 Apr 2019 22:37:03 +0000

AWS Elemental congratulates EPIX, the premium TV service owned by MGM, for its recent Media Excellence Award, presented by the Interactive Television Alliance in recognition of its TV Everywhere 4K Ultra HD streaming feature. Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), 4K Ultra HD streaming is now also available on the EPIX NOW streaming service.

To make 4K Ultra HD content available through its TV Everywhere app and the EPIX NOW streaming service, EPIX became an early adopter of the newly announced Accelerated Transcoding feature within AWS Elemental MediaConvert. With Accelerated Transcoding, EPIX was able to more quickly transcode large volumes of film and television content into 4K Ultra HD format for on-demand streaming to customers.

When preparing files for the new 4K Ultra HD streaming feature, a traditional approach to video processing was not practical due to lengthy transcode times. Transcode of a two-hour feature for streaming could take up to 16 hours. VOD providers need to turn content around much more quickly to meet the demands of viewers. In addition to greater video processing speed, EPIX was looking for a solution that would offer adaptive bitrate (ABR) outputs for multiple deliverables from a single encoded asset, with more efficient encoded file sizes.

Enter Accelerated Transcoding from AWS, which leverages significant engineering advancements that account for data rates, various GOP structures, video player compatibility, and more, as well as the vast cloud computing resources of AWS to reduce turnaround times. Through Accelerated Transcoding, EPIX dramatically lowered transcode times even at 4K resolution, completing conversion of a standard two-hour film in just 45 minutes. Such significant time savings is very valuable to EPIX as it adds additional 4K content and expands into new platforms.

“Before launching our 4K streaming feature, we looked for a transcoding solution with the highest-quality codecs and built-in resiliency. We also added multiple new resolutions in order to continue to provide adaptive stream optimization for the end viewer; taking into account different device models, bandwidth variances, and covering the spectrum of mobile to set top.” said Sacha Stanton, Chief Technology Officer, EPIX. “AWS Elemental MediaConvert gives us all of this and more; it’s a flexible cloud solution so we don’t need any on-premises hardware, it supports full API control which is a must for us, and Accelerated Transcoding expedites delivery of the best 4K streaming experience to multiple devices.”

“We’re continuing to expand our offerings and see AWS Elemental as an important partner to help us improve our viewer experience. High quality 4K transcodes take 4X the number of pixels of HD, and the fact that what used to take hours can now be done in minutes is incredibly efficient for a team as small and fast-paced as ours, where flexibility is key,” added Jon Dakss, Chief Digital Officer, EPIX.

NAB Show Sessions Look to the Future of Media with AWS

Alyssa — Wed, 03 Apr 2019 17:00:17 +0000

Every year, NAB Show curates a rich, forward-looking conference agenda that brings to light ideas and technologies that will propel the media industry forward. For next week’s conference, Amazon Web Services will produce two groundbreaking gatherings of industry experts to explore the future of media creation and distribution, and what it means for broadcasters and other content providers:

Beyond the Field: How Sports Pioneers are Powering the 360 Audience Experience in the Cloud
Led by NFL.com analytics expert Cynthia Frelund, this Main Stage Keynote panel reveals how next-generation media workflows can create enhanced, customized experiences for sports fans using cloud services and artificial intelligence. Sharing their insights are sports media leaders Stephanie Lone, Senior Vice President, Engineering, CBS Sports Digital; Rafael Soltanovich, Vice President, Software Development, Hulu; Scott Sonnenberg, Chief Global Partnerships Officer, LA Clippers; and Mark Kramer, Vice President, Engineering and Technology, Pac-12 Networks. The session takes place Monday, April 8 at 2:30 p.m. on the Main Stage (N4) of the Las Vegas Convention Center. The event is also available to view on demand at https://www.nabshow.com/video/beyond-field

Video Storytelling as a Service: How Cloud Helps Broadcasters Streamline and Become Go-to Digital Destinations
This panel session explores the use of cloud services to streamline newsroom workflows, accelerate real-time news delivery and distribution, and help attract bigger audiences. Moderator John Clark, Executive Director, NAB PILOT is joined by panelists Catherine Badalamente, Vice President, Digital Media, Graham Media Group; Matt Monahan, Director of Product, Arc Publishing at Arc Publishing/Washington Post; and Alex Dunlap, Amazon Web Services, Inc., General Manager for AWS Elemental. The panel takes place Tuesday, April 9 at 11:20 a.m. in room N260 of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Follow AWS Elemental on Twitter for NAB Show news and live updates from our panel sessions.

Pac-12 Networks on Transforming the Fan Experience

Lisa — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 19:15:52 +0000

Pac-12 Networks, the sports media production arm of the Pac-12 Conference, has gone all-in on AWS to transform the collegiate sports experience for its millions of fans. In this video, Mark Kramer, Vice President, Engineering & Technology, shares how Pac-12 Networks applies AWS Elemental Media Services along with AWS services for database, storage, compute, and machine learning as it delivers more than 850 live events and over 200 hours of studio programming per year.

Get to Know SPEKE

Alyssa — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 15:33:25 +0000

Today, AWS introduced the Secure Packager and Encoder Key Exchange, or SPEKE for short. So, what is it? SPEKE is an open API specification that aims to democratize media workflows by streamlining the way Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems integrate with encryptors. For those unfamiliar with the term, “encryptors” encompasses encoders, transcoders, and origin servers. In video processing and delivery workflows, encryptors obtain encryption keys from DRM platforms, encrypt content, and send it downstream for consumption.

SPEKE delivers a standardized method for key exchange between encryptors and DRM systems for both live and on-demand media workflows, while allowing media customers to use any SPEKE-enabled key server or encryptor in on-premises, cloud, or hybrid infrastructures. SPEKE is built on the DASH Industry Forum’s Content Protection Information Exchange (CPIX) specification. SPEKE builds on CPIX for authentication and other behaviors, and eliminates the need for intense, complex integrations between proprietary multi-DRM APIs and encryptors from different vendors. AWS Elemental MediaConvert, AWS Elemental MediaPackage, AWS Elemental Live and AWS Elemental Delta each support SPEKE and we are looking for other encoding, transcoding, and packaging vendors to integrate SPEKE into their product offerings. (For a deeper dive on CPIX, see this guest post on the AWS Media Blog.)

Prior to SPEKE, integration would require a custom API between each DRM key server and each encryptor, which proved time consuming and could delay the launch of new services for customers. Now, SPEKE-enabled DRM key servers should work with any SPEKE-enabled encryptors out of the box. SPEKE supports HLS, MSS, and DASH with DRM solutions including Apple FairPlay, Microsoft PlayReady, Google Widevine, AES-128, and proprietary DRMs.

More than a dozen vendors are already on board with SPEKE including AWS, Axinom, castLabs, EZDRM, INKA Entworks, Insys Video Technologies, Intertrust Technologies, Irdeto, Kaltura, NAGRA, NEXTSCAPE, Verimatrix, Viaccess-Orca, VUALTO, and WebStream.

Interested in learning more? Visit the SPEKE explained page or read the SPEKE Solution Brief. This webcast also provides a comprehensive look at SPEKE.

Advancing Live Sports Coverage with AWS Media Services

Alyssa — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 20:38:00 +0000

Across the world, live sports events consistently rank among the most-watched content on broadcast and online platforms. Over-the-top (OTT) video gives broadcasters a powerful tool to capitalize on audience excitement for these can’t-miss events. Through OTT offerings, broadcasters can deliver unique experiences to viewers’ preferred devices and enrich the fan experience with advanced statistics and interactive functionality.

In this session from AWS re:Invent 2018, Raphaël Goldwaser explains how France Télévisions moved its streaming video infrastructure to AWS Media Services to achieve fast channel start-up, flexible output options, and a future-proof technology roadmap along with excellent video quality.

You can find more customer insights from AWS re:Invent 2018 here. To learn more about building live video workflows with AWS Media Services, you can register for our webcast.

Gogo TV Takes In-Flight Entertainment Experiences to New Heights with AWS

Alyssa — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 16:10:23 +0000

Leading in-flight broadband internet provider Gogo recently committed to moving its entire infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS), going all-in on the world’s leading cloud. Gogo is improving in-flight internet and entertainment experiences for millions of passengers around the world, leveraging a range of AWS services, including analytics, serverless, database, and storage. AWS services help the company to develop and deploy applications in hours instead of days, double the number of airlines it supports with its current workforce, and take an idea from concept to production much faster.

The company also uses AWS Elemental Live video processing and delivery to provide the consistency and low latency required for live and on-demand video at 30,000 feet. Gogo’s transition to AWS comes at a time when the demand for content is intensifying, with 60 percent of global airline passengers citing in-flight Wi-Fi availability as a necessity when choosing an airline and booking a flight. That number is considerable given that the equivalent of more than half the world’s population (4.1 billion) took off in airplanes in 2017.

A pioneer of in-flight entertainment experiences, Gogo was the first to enable commercial airlines to stream video to passengers’ smart tablets, to stream pre-theatrical and first-run movie titles to devices, and to install FTE wireless systems aboard thousands of aircraft. To help airlines maintain high-quality viewing experiences and scale with passenger demand for more varieties of in-flight entertainment, the company is using AWS Elemental Live to process and deliver live and on-demand video services on board more than 2,500 commercial aircraft.

GogoTV, Gogo’s live TV service, relies extensively on AWS Elemental solutions to power transcoding for 24 live TV channels across five airlines. Distributed from a centralized headend in the US, GogoTV captures content from international providers. That content is backhauled via fiber to the Gogo IPTV headend, where it is transcoded to High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) using AWS Elemental Live. In addition to HEVC, AWS Elemental also provides support for statistical channel multiplexing. As a result, Gogo is able to deliver consistently broadcast-quality viewing experiences with low latency to passengers. AWS Elemental solutions also enable Gogo to use significantly less satellite communications bandwidth.

To find out more about how Gogo is using AWS services, please visit https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/gogo-goes-all-aws.

Amazon Web Services Live Streaming, Real-time Captions, Augmented Reality Shine this Oscars Season

Alyssa — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 16:29:13 +0000

More than 29 million viewers tuned into the Academy Awards® telecast in February, and while the ceremony itself is a major draw, ancillary programming featuring live interviews and commentary throughout the event has become increasingly popular in recent years. Capitalizing on this trend, IMDb brought back its live Oscars®-themed viewing party this year, tapping Broadcast Management Group (BMG) for the third year to produce and stream the show to Twitter, Twitch, Amazon.com, and IMDb.com. The five-hour live program featured celebrity interviews including Elton John, with encoding and captioning for each live stream powered by AWS Elemental Live. Programming included a pre-show event, second-screen show with winner updates, social highlights and more, as well as a post-show party.

BMG used AWS Elemental Live to encode 1080p streams of IMDb’s live Oscars viewing party to each viewing platform with real-time closed captioning. Using Quality-Defined Variable Bitrate (QVBR) encoding available via AWS Elemental Live, BMG was able to ensure a consistent, high-quality experience for audiences across viewing platforms while minimizing bits used. IMDb covered the event live from the Elton John AIDS Foundation Academy Awards Viewing Party, with actor/director Aisha Tyler and IMDb correspondent Dave Karger hosting. BMG also tapped AWS Elemental encoders this year to produce a two-hour live show covering the Vanity Fair Oscars party.

Commenting on the productions, BMG CEO Todd Mason said, “There's no margin for error when producing live streams for Hollywood’s biggest night and with celebrities waiting in the wings for interviews. Delivering to multiple platforms can pose a number of encoding challenges, but with AWS Elemental Live we were able to rest easy knowing that we could depend on it to power a compelling experience for audiences across the globe while also streamlining our process.”

In addition to the IMDb and Vanity Fair party streams, AWS was also excited to see “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” win the Oscar for Best Animated Film. Congratulations to our friends at Sony Pictures Entertainment, whose Spider-Verse AR experience was built with Amazon Sumerian and continues to delight fans. To enjoy this experience, visit intothespiderverse-ar.com from your mobile device.

Kayo Sports Scales Live Sports Service with AWS Media Solutions

James — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 22:49:45 +0000

It’s hard to overstate the global popularity of live sports programming, and the Australian market, with its thriving slate of homegrown and international leagues, is a shining example. With its recently launched multi-sport streaming service, Kayo Sports offers Australia’s sports fans a massive selection of more than 50 live sports powered by FOX SPORTS Australia, ESPN, and beIN SPORTS.

Subscribers can stream Kayo’s library of live and on-demand sports on iOS and Android mobile devices, laptops and PCs, and on TVs with Telstra TV, Apple TV, and Chromecast Ultra apps. Events are available in 1080p HD and users can stream to as many as three events or games at the same time. SplitView functionality means viewers can watch up to four events or camera angles on one screen on selected devices. Kayo also offers a feature that lets viewers hide stats and scores so they can catch up on completed events without stumbling upon the final result.

Enabling Kayo’s dynamic audience experience is video infrastructure from AWS. Kayo uses AWS Elemental Live encoding on-premises to prepare live streams for the AWS Cloud, where AWS Elemental Media Services process, package, and deliver HLS and MPEG-DASH streams for distribution through the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN). The Kayo sports service lets users control the action with pause, rewind, and replay functionality delivered by AWS Elemental MediaPackage, and the workflow supports Kayo Key Moments, which lets viewers skip straight to highlights during on-demand viewing.

Performance, scale, and resiliency were key priorities for Kayo’s video infrastructure. AWS Elemental Media Services and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) scale automatically with demand, and MediaPackage manages resources across multiple AWS Availability Zones as it prepares and originates content for delivery to CloudFront. A data lake built on Amazon EC2 and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables analysis of live performance data to support continuous optimization, while on the front end of the service, AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions support serverless execution of sign-ups and user validation.

“Kayo provides a new way for Australians to experience sport,” said Thomas Kaurin, Director of Technology at Kayo Sports. “With over 30,000 hours of content and game-changing features, it’s critical we deliver the best possible experience to sports-loving Aussies. AWS helps Kayo do this through its fast pace of innovation, with constantly evolving tools that help us deliver a world class experience.”

To learn more about how AWS can help bring live sports to audiences worldwide, download the E-book, “Use the Cloud to Deliver Great Fan Experiences” or visit the live sports application page.