Over the past few years, AWS has become the world’s go-to cloud platform offering over 200 fully-featured services from globally distributed data centers. The AWS services are now considered the building blocks for many modern software products. Video platforms, with vast amounts of data to store, process and distribute globally, are no different. Media companies have readily embraced the convenience and affordability of processing, converting and streaming broadcasts and over-the-top video content with AWS. 

Today’s insane rate of media consumption and dynamic trends put very high pressure on video platforms to keep up. On top of that comes the growing number of connected devices and audiences wanting to access various video platforms. These are the challenges that are incredibly hard – or inefficient – for independent in-house teams to solve.

Some of the main challenges of today’s OTT video providers include:

  • Hardware-related difficulties and costs,
  • Difficulty of easily predicting demand and scaling,
  • Technologically falling behind competitors and lacking the agility to experiment and innovate. 

What are the benefits of deploying a video platform on AWS?

AWS solves some of the problems of modern video providers. It provides them with tools which make it possible to stop worrying about thighs such as infrastructure, speed and capacity. Whether for VOD or live streaming, video providers can run end-to-end OTT video workflows on the AWS cloud for convenience, cost-efficiency, security, simplicity, reliability, and easy integration with other AWS services. The combination of these benefits can allow the video providers to:

  • Focus more on the content and less on the infrastructure.
  • Pay only for what you use with AWS pay-as-you-go pricing.
  • Gain developmental agility – reduce time to market while AWS scales up to meet storage, computing, and other requirements.
  • Scale to the right capacity and shrink back immediately after peaks.
  • Distribute content globally – ingest videos near content owners and serve from servers close to the audiences.
  • Spend less time maintaining the infrastructure and more time innovating and experimenting with new technologies like machine learning.

With pay-as-you-go pricing, AWS services bring you the full-package video infrastructure needed to deliver great viewing experiences to your audiences – anywhere and on any screen.

Building software without using AWS services is expensive, inefficient and unnecessarily difficult. In this article, we focus on the key benefits of integrating your video platform with AWS.

Dynamic pricing

Building a video platform from scratch would typically require heavy investment in hardware, and involve lots of maintenance from the in-house team. This creates an unnecessarily high entry point for many businesses wanting to make their foray into the video streaming business. 

Deploying your application on Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows you to meet the highest industry standards while eliminating the high cost of investing in your own hardware. AWS’s pay-as-you-go model is also an ideal solution for startups – it doesn’t require significant capital investments upfront.

Scalable infrastructure

AWS saves you the hassle of having to predict the parameters for servers. The system responds and scales up or down to the current needs, i.e. the infrastructure grows (e.g. content requirements and audience demand) and scales down if needed. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides two media solutions to cost-effectively deliver VOD content to global audiences using the AWS Cloud. 

  • Video on Demand on AWS Foundation solution with AWS Elemental MediaConvert offers an easy way to encode video files. It is easily customizable and can be used as the starting point to create more complex workflows.
  • Video on Demand on AWS offers additional features and several options that can be customized.

Worldwide content delivery

Amazon cloud brings the benefits of worldwide content delivery, with industry-leading security and availability. 

With AWS you can easily stream your videos using Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront. There is no need to transcode your videos and upload them in different formats. Amazon Elastic Transcoder converts videos for a particular client video player or mobile device. It takes content from one S3 bucket, transcodes it and stores the result in another S3 bucket. 

AWS supports both HLS and DASH standards for adaptive bitrate streaming. Visit the BSG blog for more information about HLS and DASH.

Integrated web player and support for major third-party players

The included HTML5 video player is developer-friendly and can be easily customized to fit your platform and desired playback behavior.

Adaptive bitrate streaming, subtitles and AirPlay are supported out of the box. There is also built-in reporting for keeping track of various viewability statistics such as video view counts and minutes watched.

Access control

With AWS you can issue unique video URLs with an expiration time, not-valid-before time, geography and IP-based rules.

Alternatively, you can create video URLs that enable logged-in users to only view videos they are entitled to – to facilitate compliance with local licensing restrictions.

Firewall and security rules

While not necessarily a part of the video delivery infrastructure, Web Application Firewall is an important security component for all web applications, protecting your app against web exploits. AWS WAF gives you a way to control traffic reaching your applications. You can create security rules to block attack patterns such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting, and implement rules that filter out specific traffic patterns you define. 

These rules are updated regularly. AWS WAF includes a full-featured API that you can use to automate the creation, deployment, and maintenance of security rules.

Like many other AWS services, WAF is offered in the pay-as-you-go model based on how many rules you deploy and how many web requests your application receives. 

Focus on content

If you really want to get your business going and would rather avoid having to deal with acquiring and maintaining video hardware, AWS does the heavy lifting for you. With the extra confidence of running on the world’s most reliable cloud infrastructure, you can focus on the business and creative side of things. This is an often overlooked but important advantage.

Experiment and test new ideas quickly

AWS gives you the agility to quickly build, test, and launch new products, channels, or services to gain an edge over your competition. By eliminating the guesswork and avoiding capacity planning you can easily deploy and test various monetization strategies, security features, and machine-learning tools without long-term commitments.

Considering AWS for your media platform? You’ve come to the right place!

We build mobile applications, web and backend solutions for broadcasters, content owners, telecommunication and media companies. Through joining our passion for new technologies and taking utmost care of the aesthetics as well as usability of our projects, we create new business possibilities and help our clients in digital transformation.

At BSG, we provide consulting and integration services for AWS. The Better, our white-label video platform is integrated with a number of AWS services – from CDN, media package, S3 storage all the way to AWS WAF for security. We also use Amazon ECS for managing infrastructure – this is where all servers and APIs live.

Apart from offering the white label video platform and streaming solutions, we also provide consulting and AWS integration services. 

If you’re in the process of or considering developing a video platform, shoot us an email – we’re always willing to talk! Our experts will offer a free consultation of your project.