Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers customers several methods to cost-effectively deliver live video content to a global audience in the AWS Cloud. One method is to combine multiple AWS services to build Over-the-top (OTT) solutions for live video streaming. OTT is direct delivery over the internet.
AWS offers two solutions that employ this method, a simpler one with MediaStore (single input with single HLS output) and other including the AWS Elemental Media Package allowing multiple output formats and endpoints.
Both solutions build a highly available and cost-effective architecture that delivers a reliable real-time viewing experience.
Live Streaming on AWS with MediaStore
This solution provides you with the fundamental tools and resources to deliver live video content. It replaces MediaPackage with AWS Elemental MediaStore for live stream origination. This option is designed to provide a simple solution with fewer customization options. MediaLive uses a single-pipeline channel, so only one input is required, and outputs are HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) only. This option also supports using an AWS Elemental Link device as the input.
Live Streaming on AWS with MediaStore architecture
The solution deploys AWS Elemental MediaLive, which ingests an input feed and transcodes your content into one adaptive bit-rate (ABR) HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) stream as output.
AWS Elemental MediaStore provides a scalable low-latency storage container to host the HLS segments from the MediaLive outputs.
Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to use the MediaStore custom endpoints as its origin. The CloudFront distribution delivers your live stream to viewers with low latency and high transfer speeds.
The solution also includes an Amazon CloudWatch dashboard that monitors the ingress and egress requests to AWS Elemental MediaStore, giving an overview of the health and performance of the live streaming workflow
Live Streaming on AWS
This solution is a fully featured solution, with options for customization. Built with AWS Elemental MediaLive and AWS Elemental MediaPackage, this solution is designed to provide high levels of resilience by using a standard MediaLive channel with dual inputs and outputs as well as redundant inputs for MediaPackage. This solution provides multiple output formats for playback support on different players and clients and MediaPackage enables you to customize your workflow in a number of ways. You can also add support for content protection using DRM, enable DVR-like features such as live rewind and restart, and build Live-to-VOD workflows.
AWS provides a live streaming solution that combines AWS Elemental MediaLive and AWS Elemental MediaPackage with Amazon CloudFront to build a highly resilient and scalable architecture that delivers your live content worldwide. The diagram below presents the live streaming video architecture you can automatically deploy using the solution’s implementation guide and accompanying AWS CloudFormation template.
Live Streaming on AWS architecture
The solution deploys AWS Elemental MediaLive, which ingests two input feeds and transcodes your content into two adaptive bitrate (ABR) HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) streams as output.
AWS Elemental MediaPackage ingests the MediaLive output and packages the live stream into HLS, Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), and Common Media Application Format (CMAF) formats that are delivered to three MediaPackage custom endpoints.
An Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to use the MediaPackage custom endpoints as its origin and includes a CDN identifier custom HTTP header to authenticate requests. The CloudFront distribution delivers your live stream to viewers with low latency and high transfer speeds.
The solution also includes a demo HTML preview player that you can use to test the solution. The player is a static website hosted in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. Amazon CloudFront is used to restrict access to the solution’s website bucket contents.
