AWS Elemental launches five video processing services in the cloud

AWS Announces Family of Five AWS Media Services for Complete Video Workflows

SEATTLE — Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced 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 customized video applications and pay only for the technology resources they use, without upfront capital investment.

Whether for entertainment, sports, news, education, community engagement, or corporate alignment, consumers today expect great video experiences delivered securely and reliably to any device including tablets, smart phones, connected TVs, or set-top boxes. Previously, to meet these high expectations, video providers had to procure very expensive, specialized broadcast equipment that was inflexible, slow to adapt to new device platforms, hard to scale to meet times of peak demand, and often lacked support for the latest video formats, resolutions, and streaming techniques. What’s more, if the video provider wanted to adopt new revenue-generating business models, such as personalized advertising to a global customer base, they needed to spend considerable time and effort making that work seamlessly across all devices.

AWS Elemental Media Services eliminate the need to procure expensive equipment for video data centers. These services automate what were previously complex, labor-intensive processes that manage on-going video operations. And, AWS Elemental Media Services let video providers avoid wasted infrastructure due to on-going technology obsolescence. With AWS Elemental Media Services, which combine the proven broadcast-quality video solutions from AWS Elemental with the security, durability, availability, and scalability of AWS, video providers can focus on making great content that is delivered via the cloud instead of building and maintaining on-premises video infrastructure. Projects that once took months or years—such as standing up 24×7 live broadcast channels, converting a library of video-on-demand (VOD) assets for distribution, or streaming a high-profile live event—can now be completed in a fraction of the time with AWS Elemental Media Services. Additionally, by using AWS Elemental Media Services, video providers can also incorporate personalized advertisements into streaming video using advanced techniques to generate additional revenues with their video content.

“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 startups, 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:

• 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 optimized for media.
• AWS Elemental MediaTailor: Insert targeted advertising into your video without sacrificing quality to increase viewer engagement and boost revenues.