We are a small, but industrious team of developers whose experience with AWS Elemental -a collection of services meant to work together to rush to your every media need, whether to store on-demand media, or streaming it across the world- spans across multiple projects.
Well, I would’ve liked to say AWS Elemental was, elementary, but as a multiple faceted service that is aimed at modularity and flexibility, it is not quite.
Media and entertainment industry undergoes a mass-scale transformation, and reinventions take over the market. This isn’t an age of improvement, but total change. Content creation, media supply chains, competing for attention, streaming, broadcast, direct-to-consumer platforms… To remain competitive, you have to keep up with all these, and more. Luckily, AWS Elemental helps you see this process through, by focusing on five main areas. Content production, supply chain & archive, broadcast, direct-to-consumer & streaming and data science. Elemental gives you the right tools for your work.
AWS Elemental has its parts moving together to deliver a complete solution. It maybe better if we examined how it works, piece by piece as it streams a live media content.
It starts with AWS Elemental Live, which works by encoding your live video streams in real-time, taking a larger-sized live video source and compressing it into smaller versions for distribution to your viewers. With AWS Elemental MediaLive, you can easily set up streams for both live events and 24×7 channels with advanced broadcasting features, high availability, and pay-as-you-go pricing.
Then, the output is sent to AWS Elemental MediaPackage, which tailors and tinkers with it, until it turns from a single video input, into video streams formatted to play on connected TVs, mobile phones, computers, tablets, and game consoles. It makes it easy to implement popular video features for viewers (start-over, pause, rewind, etc.), like those commonly found on DVRs. AWS Elemental MediaPackage can also protect your content using Digital Rights Management (DRM). AWS Elemental MediaPackage scales automatically in response to load, so your viewers will always get a great experience without you having to accurately predict in advance the capacity you’ll need.
This is of course, only one of the experiences you’ll have with AWS Elemental. You can use instead MediaStore as the origin of your video assets instead of MediaPackage if you are working with stored content, or make use of MediaConvert to turn your video asset into video-on-demand (VOD) content for broadcast and multiscreen delivery at scale. The service combines advanced video and audio capabilities with a simple web services interface and pay-as-you-go pricing.