AWS Direct-to-Consumer & Streaming showcase at IBC 2024

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) for Media & Entertainment (M&E) Direct-to-Consumer & Streaming solution area provides services and solutions to help M&E companies prepare, deliver, personalize, and monetize their content across multiple platforms and channels and to provide rich customer experiences with live, linear, and on-demand content.

At IBC Show 2024 September 13—16 in Amsterdam, AWS Direct-to-Consumer & Streaming presents seven integrated demonstrations featuring AWS cloud services and AWS Partner solutions. These demonstrations bring together end-to-end, direct-to-consumer workflows including content and metadata ingestion, media encoding and packaging, live transcription and localization, personalized consumer presentations, dynamic immersive experiences, and optimized service operations and observability.

Direct-to-Consumer solutions integrate with those from other AWS M&E solution areas, including generative AI solutions in the Data Science and Analytics solution area, content localization in the Media Supply Chain solution area, and live streaming in the Broadcast & Live Production solution area. The Direct-to-Consumer kiosk on AWS stand 5.C90 at IBC 2024 also includes live demonstrations of immersive interfaces for interactive viewing of live video with supporting content.

The Direct-to-Consumer demonstrations at IBC broadly fit into five categories: Extended Reality (XR) immersive content experiences, Free Ad-supported Streaming Television (FAST) channels and VOD content management, localized video streaming, user-influenced content creation, and optimized operations with highly productive monitoring and observability.

Increased consumer engagement through immersive experiences

Video platform operators need new and engaging ways to deliver content to their customers. XR technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are transforming what is possible for in-home entertainment by expanding both consumption and interactivity possibilities. Consumers can now experience engaging interactive content alongside live streaming sporting events, including live statistics, multi-camera feeds, player cards, and 3D sponsored experiences.

On the AWS stand, an interactive football match will be on display with interactive data and commerce and supporting technology from AWS Partners Accedo and ATEME.

AWS Partner Monks will highlight interactive experiences, including front row for a concert, courtside for live sports, and other destinations leveraging 180-degree immersive streaming video.

Services: AWS Elemental MediaLive, AWS Elemental MediaPackage, Amazon Transcribe
Partners: Accedo, ATEME, Monks

Optimized FAST channel creation and video on demand personalization

Free Ad-supported Television (FAST) platform operators need fast and efficient channel creation and content personalization to maximize viewing time and reduce overall customer churn.

The Direct-to-Consumer team will demonstrate how IMDb film data, accessed through AWS Data Exchange, can be used in conjunction with the generative AI capabilities of Amazon Bedrock with the Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku model fine-tuned on IMDb’s dataset using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). RAG allows the language model to retrieve and condition on relevant information from the IMDb knowledge base during generation. Customized FAST channels are created for consumers based on a chat-like request for content around any requested description.

AWS Partner ThinkAnalytics‘s ThinkFAST solution along with AWS Elemental MediaTailor channel assembly will be used to demonstrate how content library owners can automatically generate revenue-optimized FAST channel programming slates that can be further optimized over time based on user behavior data.

AWS Partner Intel’s Library for Video Super Resolution (Intel Library for VSR) is integrated into the file-based workflows to demonstrate the video quality enhancement capabilities of that solution for the highest resolution playback.

Services: Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Personalize, AWS Data Exchange, AWS Elemental MediaTailor
Partners: Accedo, Intel, ThinkAnalytics

Localized live streaming with viewer-controlled interactive video

Broadcasters and live channel OTT operators need cost-effective and highly resilient options to deliver live video programming with subtitles in both spoken language as well as other translated languages. Selectable, real-time subtitles in multiple languages will be displayed and enabled through the use of Amazon Transcribe and AWS Partner SyncWords’ real-time translation solution. AWS Partner Accedo’s OTT platform provides an example host for the channels on display.

OTT platforms and FAST channel operators that want to enable customers to stream multiple channels or multiple camera views in a single player frame have previously needed to deliver each view in parallel, increasing the bandwidth consumed and cost for delivery. AWS Partner TiledMedia will demonstrate how AWS Elemental MediaLive generates HEVC tiles encodes and how MediaPackage supports the creation of the necessary view packaging for efficient delivery. The TiledMedia player experience demonstrates how highly responsive multi-view and fast video switching is now possible even where bandwidth is constrained.

Services: AWS Elemental MediaLive, AWS Elemental MediaPackage, Amazon Transcribe
Partners: Accedo, SyncWords, TiledMedia

Consumer-driven content creation

The growth of live streaming platforms allows creators and streamers to connect with their audiences in real-time through user-generated content (UGC), fostering a sense of community and interactivity. A key challenge faced by UGC platforms is latency or the lag between user action and platform response, which can negatively affect the overall user experience. Through the use of Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS), a fully managed live streaming solution, low-latency video delivery is combined with viewer interactivity features to highlight how viewer engagement can drive content selection and features.

Amazon IVS powers live sports streaming and other events with support for multi-user chat, polls, event statistics, and other custom content delivered in synchronization with video playback. Viewer interactions are transformed into highlights, capturing the best moments of the event. These interactions are then captured and transformed into insights, which are visualized in Amazon Managed Grafana.

AWS Partner DataDog supports management of the data streams to enable insights selection based on content and user inputs.

Services: Amazon Interactive Video Service, Amazon Managed Grafana
Partners: DataDog

Optimized streaming and service monitoring and observability

OTT and direct-to-consumer service operators need timely monitoring data and comprehensive dashboards that provide actionable insights to assist efficient operations that scale to reach global audiences. Through the use of tools like Amazon QuickSight and Amazon Managed Grafana and by leveraging expanded player support for Common Media Client Data (CMCD) and video stream insights, quality of service dashboards with operational guidance from content ingestion through to device delivery will be on display.

The demonstration will also show how the generative AI capabilities of Amazon Q can be used by operators to summarize, analyze, and ask questions to determine the overall health and optimization opportunities based on collected data.

AWS Partner MUX provides actionable insights from the collected data allowing platform operators to act promptly if needed.

AWS Partner IMAX’s StreamAware is used to provide experiential video quality metrics that continuously track live and file-based video delivery quality to ensure consistent experience for all platform customers. And IMAX’s StreamSmart solution reduces overall delivery costs while maintaining consistent viewer experiential quality.

Services: Amazon Managed Grafana, Amazon Q, Amazon QuickSight, Amazon CloudFront
Partners: IMAX Consumer Streaming, MUX