What’s new from re:Invent – Relevant M&E releases and launches

With over 100 launches and announcements of new services and major features during re:Invent, it can be hard for any media technologist to keep track of the most relevant for media workloads.

Of the many announcements, three stood out as game changers for our M&E customers:

• Amazon Personalize: Leverage Amazon.com’s personalization technology to deliver personalized content and advertising. See Andy Jassy unveil Amazon Personalize.

• S3 Glacier Deep Archive: Increase reliability of media archives while optimizing for TCO compared to LTO options. Ideal for companies with large content media archives in physical format. See Andy Jassy unveil Glacier Deep Archive.

• AWS Elemental MediaConnect: For any sort of live or linear content, MediaConnect provides IP-based acquisition, transport, and distribution of broadcast streams. Watch the intro video.

Additional information + other relevant releases below. For video recordings of M&E-related sessions, you can see here.

Machine Learning// Analytics and Data Lakes:

Target M&E use cases: Content recommendation engines for video, music, and digital publishing; Personalized ad serving; Improved programming decisions through forecasting; Increased content searchability and discovery

• Amazon Personalize: Automate the creation of unique, personalized experiences for your customers in real time based on the same technology used at Amazon.com. Amazon Personalize looks at activity stream (clicks, views, conversions, etc), inventory (content library), and user (demographics, name, age, etc). Ideal for video or music streaming services, or digital publishers. Learn more
• Amazon Forecast: Improve content production and pricing decisions, along with resource planning to staff customer service centers with accurate, time-series forecasting based on the same technology used at Amazon.com. Amazon Forecast analyzes a variety of data including historical (sales, pricing, views, clicks, etc) and related (weather, competitive promotions, social media, etc) data to provide forecasts. Learn more
• Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth: Build highly accurate training datasets for machine learning quickly and increase the accuracy of metadata tags for video, image, and audio files for improved searchability and discoverability of content archives. Ground Truth can lower your labeling costs by up to 70% using automatic labeling, which works by training Ground Truth from data labeled by humans so that the service learns to label data independently. Learn more
• AWS Marketplace for Machine Learning: Accelerate your time to market with machine learning using over a hundred algorithms and models that can be deployed directly to Amazon SageMaker including for named entity recognition, speaker identification, video classification, text, and more. Learn more

Content Storage & Archive, and Media Supply Chain

Target M&E use cases: Long term archive storage (tape replacement for DAM & archive storage); Intelligent & automated tiered content storage management;

• Glacier Deep Archive: Eliminate the need for on-premises tape libraries, and no longer manage hardware refreshes or re-write data to new tapes as technologies evolve. S3 Glacier Deep Archive provides secure, durable object storage for long-term data retention and digital preservation at the lowest price of storage in AWS. It is the ideal storage class for customers who need to make archival, durable copies of data that rarely, if ever, need to be accessed. Learn more
• S3 Intelligent Tiering: Automatically optimize storage costs for data based on changing access patterns, no lifecycle policies required by automatically moving assets between the frequent access and infrequent access tiers. Learn more
• S3 Batch Operations: Manage billions of objects stored in Amazon S3, with a single API request or a few clicks in the S3 Management Console. Now, all AWS customers can make changes to object properties and metadata, and perform other storage management tasks – such as copying objects between buckets, replacing tag sets, modifying access controls, and restoring archived objects from Amazon S3 Glacier – for any number of S3 objects in minutes instead of months. Learn more
• AWS DataSync and AWS Transfer for SFTP: More options for content movement to help with global collaboration, including hybrid workflows and movement between object store, on-premises and file systems. Learn more on DataSync. Learn more on SFTP.
• 100Gbps Networking and Compute Auto Scaling: Increase content media file processing efficiency with new C5n Instances, the lowest priced vCPU in the Amazon EC2 family, along with newly launched predictive scaling of EC2 powered by ML.

Live content transport:

Target M&E use cases: Live content acquisition, transfer of broadcast streams over IP;

• AWS Elemental MediaConnect: Get the reliability and security of satellite and fiber combined with the flexibility, agility, and economics of IP-based networks using AWS Elemental MediaConnect. Combines reliable video transport, highly secure stream sharing, and real-time network traffic and video monitoring that allow you to focus on content, not transport infrastructure. Learn more.

“AWS Elemental MediaConnect, will enable Pac-12 to connect stadiums to the cloud…” – Pac-12

“AWS Elemental MediaConnect will significantly reduce the time to on-board affiliates, extend our content reach globally, and reduce the number of formats we distribute using its granular entitlements feature.” – ITV

Content Production

Target M&E use cases: Remote production; Edit-in-cloud and / virtualized graphics workstation; Rendering;

• Snowball Edge with more Compute and GPU: Get more compute capabilities for on-the-set content production for scenarios such as full motion video processing when connectivity is a challenge or time-coded speech-to-text so editors can quickly find specific dialog as soon as dailies are uploaded to the cloud. Learn more.
• Amazon FSx for Windows and Lustre File Server: High performant shared FileSystems providing sub-millisecond latencies for jobs such as large-scale rendering, transcoding, virtual edit/VFX workstations, and other supply chain tasks. Learn more.
• AWS Outposts: For media workloads like live streaming or batch rendering where low latency matters most, When latency matters most, AWS Outposts bring native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility. Use the same APIs, the same tools, the same hardware, and the same functionality across on-premises and in the cloud to deliver a truly consistent hybrid experience. Outposts can be used to support workloads that need to remain on-premises due to low latency or local data processing needs. Learn more.