AWS Direct-to-Consumer & Streaming Showcase at NAB Show 2024

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

At the 2024 NAB Show in Las Vegas, AWS Direct-to-Consumer & Streaming presented 21 integrated demonstrations featuring AWS services and AWS Partners. These demos highlighted end-to-end direct to consumer workflows from content and metadata ingestion, media encoding and packaging, scalable and personalized consumer experiences, and overall service operations monitoring and observability solutions.

These demonstrations integrated with those from other AWS for M&E solution areas including live newsroom content from Broadcast, file-based content from Media Supply Chain, optimized advertising and subscriber management solutions from Monetization, and personalization experiences from Data Science & Analytics. And consistent with the overall theme of AWS for M&E demonstrations at NAB 2024, the Direct-to-Consumer solution area featured multiple use cases leveraging cloud-based live production for the NAB Show Live newsroom programming.

Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) demonstrations broadly fit into four categories: live streaming, FAST channel creation and VOD content, consumer experiences featuring interactive applications, and streaming service monitoring, observability, and operations optimizations.

Live streaming at scale with multilingual captioning, cloud DVR, and dynamic ad insertion

Broadcasters and live channel OTT operators need cost-effective and highly resilient options to deliver live video programming with personalized ad insertion. To demonstrate these capabilities, demos used AWS Elemental MediaLive, MediaPackage, and MediaTailor to deliver news production live video to a range of common consumer devices with personalized, targeted advertising automatically inserted by MediaTailor based on the SpringServe ad decisioning system.

Selectable, real-time subtitles in multiple languages were enabled through the use of AWS Partner SyncWords’ transcription and translation solution. Low-latency video delivery solutions highlighted the fastest content delivery possible needed for competitive or gaming use cases.

A serverless user generated content application combined the NAB Live newsroom streaming video with an easy interface for viewers to react and comment to the programming. The application, powered by Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS), used new IVS support for the Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) protocol for video ingest and contribution. Fans decided the best moments shown in the programming by their reactions and comments. The application generated clips and highlights automatically based on that feedback.

Partner ATEME’s cloud DVR solution, which integrates both Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), added highly scalable in-the-cloud recording and playback of the news programming and other live streaming content to show a seamless integration for these customer-desired features from platform operators.

Services: AWS Elemental MediaLive, AWS Elemental MediaPackage, AWS Elemental MediaTailor, Amazon Elastic Block Storage, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon IVS
Partners: ATEME, Magnite SpringServe, SyncWords

Optimized FAST channel creation, live-to-VOD automation, and secured enhanced video experiences

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.

Live to video on demand (VOD) content preparation combined with the capabilities of Amazon Personalize was used to create a satisfying viewing experience for customers consuming VOD content. MediaTailor added targeted advertising for both VOD and FAST channel playout demonstrations. To highlight the opportunity to deliver an excellent viewing experience, AWS Partner Intel’s Library for Video Super Resolution (Intel Library for VSR) was integrated into the file-based workflow to demonstrate the video quality enhancement capabilities with that solution to support the highest resolution playback environments.

The D2C team demonstrated how IMDb film data, accessed through AWS Data Exchange, could be used in conjunction with the generative AI capabilities of Amazon Bedrock with 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 relevant information from the IMDb knowledge base during generation. Customized FAST channels can be created for consumers based on a chat-like request for content around any theme.

For use cases where the integrity or security of the delivered video is paramount, AWS Partner NAGRA’s NexGuard forensic watermarking was used to aid in both content security and detection of any modifications from the original source. NAGRA received an NAB Show Product of the Year Award for its solution in conjunction with Frame.io.

For FAST and first party video OTT and mobile application providers, content and platform personalization is critical for creating optimal customer experiences. AWS Partners Accedo, ThinkAnalytics, and Amagi showed personalized fast channel creation from VOD assets. And, the ThinkAnalytics ThinkFAST solution along with AWS Elemental MediaTailor channel assembly demonstrated 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. ThinkFAST was recognized as a 2024 Product of the Year Awards winner at NAB Show.

Services: Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Personalize, AWS Data Exchange, AWS Elemental MediaTailor
Partners: Accedo, Amagi, IMAX Consumer Streaming, Intel, NAGRA, ThinkAnalytics

Interactive, real-time, and enhanced video experiences at scale

OTT platform and live streaming app operators require easy-to-configure and operate systems for delivering low-latency or real-time streaming or shared video combined with interactive features that enable additional data, images, and content to be shared by participants. AWS Partner LiveLike showed its interactive viewing experience that uses Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) to create a community watch platform for live sports and other events with support for multi-user chat, polls, event statistics, and other custom content delivered in sync with the video playback.

Amazon Bedrock with the Stable Diffusion XL generative AI image creation model integrated with Amazon IVS was used to create an easy way to for service operators to enable customers to create unique, high-quality live streaming backgrounds tailored to their content, brand, or event. Amazon IVS was used to enable virtual world character creation and user interaction with AWS Partner VRoid’s Studio and Hub solutions.

OTT platforms and FAST channel operators who want to enable their 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. At NAB, the D2C team with AWS Partner TiledMedia demonstrated how AWS Elemental MediaLive generates HEVC tiles encodes and MediaPackage supports the creation of the necessary view packaging for efficient delivery. The TiledMedia player experience demonstrated how highly responsive multi-view and fast video switching is now possible even where bandwidth is constrained.

Services: Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Interactive Video Service, AWS Elemental MediaLive, AWS Elemental MediaPackage
Partners: LiveLike, TiledMedia, VRoid

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 enable efficient operations that scale to reach global audiences. Through the use of tools like Amazon QuickSight and Amazon Managed Grafana and by leveraging Common Media Client Data (CMCD) and video stream insights, quality of service dashboards with operational guidance from content ingestion through to device delivery were shown.

AWS Partner Accedo leveraged New Relic’s observability platform to provide both operational and behavioral insights for platform operators. Partner Bitmovin showed how its AI-driven insights can be used to optimize VOD workflows and systems to manage demand across channels and player profiles. And AWS Partner IMAX’s StreamAware was used to provide experiential video quality metrics that continuously tracked live and file-based video delivery quality to ensure consistent experience for all platform customers. IMAX’s StreamAware and StreamSmart were both recognized as 2024 Product of the Year Award winners at NAB Show.

IMAX’s StreamSmart solution reduces overall delivery costs while enabling a service operator to maintain a desired viewer experiential quality.

AWS Partner Amplitude showed how its comprehensive analytics platform can be used to capture user journeys within application experiences and then make recommendations to optimize customer experiences based on each customer profile.

Services: Amazon Managed Grafana, Amazon QuickSight, Amazon CloudFront
Partners: Accedo, Amplitude, Bitmovin, IMAX Consumer Streaming

Conclusion

The AWS M&E Direct-to-Consumer & Streaming solution area demonstrations at NAB Show 2024 highlighted the fast pace of innovation in live and file-based video delivery services with both AWS services and partner solutions.