AWS Media Services – Process, Store, and Monetize Cloud-Based Video

Maybe you want that. If you don't like the way it's done elsewhere, do it yourself. Or, build a Training Videos platform via this with the metadata format you like and sell it as a service to companies.

Depending on the pricing it could become feasible for twitch and periscope users to have their own site with their own stream and ads inserted, while still streaming to facebook live/periscope/twitch etc. I wonder if these products support parallel streaming to facebook live out of the box?

Yeah, I'd want to put all of that in the client, which is not just a branding exercise but is also a branding exercise, so .. I dunno that I want to give Amazon all the business logic. There is still plenty of scope here, for abstracting away the value into the "very nice client app/front-end that makes people tell their friends.."

One major factor to consider is what the value of Youtube becomes here. In this case it is free HD video hosting and a built-in social network and platform for getting organic and paid exposure to your brand. Simply creating droneflying.com and posting some videos there won't get you any eyeballs.

> I know, building a CDN isn't simple, but when I tried to build my own platform, it wasn't about building something about video streaming. It was about creating my own CDN to lower the costs. I don't think I'm alone with that problem.

Were you successful in starting something?

Did you end up creating your own CDN?

Lets say someone had a platform, servers and were ready to rock:

- How do they implement that CDN?

- Could it be a case of getting hosting providers who offer Nth percentile or unlimited bandwidth (to a point)? I've seen these packages on webhostingtalk.com

- What are the costs associated with that?

- What are the gotchas with maintenance and running costs?

Would love to know your thoughts.

So we basically started out with a very naive solution: A Docker image with ffmpeg and access to a shared Redis DB used for job coordination running on a somewhat beefy server from Hetzner (beefy compared to regular VPS offerings, something in the 40€ range with 16 or 32gb of RAM I think). This turned out to work surprisingly well so we built a small API around that mirroring parts of Zencoder's API. This way, we can switch between both services on a per-job-basis and only need to change the encoding service's endpoint URL.

The main thing that will get you (if you do input validations) are the video formats. I've tried to get an authoritative list of valid MIME types beforehand, but still people managed to somehow send us videos with weird encodings that I'd never heard of before. Other than that, the usual caveats regarding self-hosted services (availability, failover, backups, etc.) apply but have so far not been much of a problem to us (especially since we can just go back to Zencoder when something breaks and needs to be done fast).

Feel free to drop me a message (mail is in my profile) if you have any questions.

AWS purchased Elemental in 2015. There is some overlap but Elemental Media* services are more flexible and provide JIT encoding and dynamic ad insertion, to serve a broader market than ET did.

Disclaimer: AWS employee.

For the higher scale video I think most solutions are proprietary - especially as most make use of CDNs and other globally deployed infrastructure. However I’ve seen startups do mass scale live streaming at pretty low latency (8 - 16) seconds by just transcoding and serving clips off of S3

You could think of them as Lego bricks, combine a couple of them together and you could easily have a "broadcast grade" workflow for your content.

But back to your original question, currently MediaLive does not say it supports RTMP outputs (make sure to request it as a feature!) so using it as a "one-to-many" would require another lego brick to convert UDP to RTMP.

However, once support has been added for RTMP outputs, you could live stream to any platform (Twitch, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram) that supports the RTMP protocol.

The neat thing about MediaLive is that it allows you to use audio, video, or caption tracks. So for example, if you had a single source that had platform-specific tracks, you could create outputs for each platform and use the corresponding track to create curated content.

But, that's just one example of hundreds that is possible with AWS Media Services.

This is what Mux Video will be (source: Mux founder). If you want low-level atoms for transcoding, origin serving, delivery, security, etc. - use AWS or Zencoder + Fastly or whatever. If you don't want these atoms, but want a single API to everything "video," with decisions made by a team of video experts, use Mux.

We just opened an Early Access program if you want to check it out - https://mux.com/video.

Now that WebRTC is available on all major browsers it should be easier to create some of these streaming applications. Although getting everything setup is still tedious.

WebTorrent [0] is built on WebRTC and can be used to stream videos, but it doesn't handle live streaming.

[0] https://webtorrent.io

I've used elemental for nearly a decade, and I love this stuff. However they were stagnating (likely their focus was their transition into AWS). I'm excited to see how that evolves. Sadly right now the UIs for the products they just launched have a lot of issues, so it's not quite for fiddling around yet. It also requires a good amount of video knowledge to not dig yourself a hole ;).

Conferences such as reinvent naturally have a lot of touch-points, but it doesn't do well if there's more being pumped out than can be consumed, or so much that your target audience doesn't notice their particular area of interest amongst the noise.