AWS for Media & Entertainment: View from the Top 2021
2021 is a transformational year for media and entertainment (M&E) as companies across the industry rapidly pioneer new ways to work and entertain. The cloud is crucial in supporting these innovations, making remote workflows simpler and more accessible, and providing the flexibility and scalability required to rapidly launch new streaming services, expand content catalogues, and deliver standout audience experiences. This year alone, Disney+ surpassed 116 million subscribers, while platforms like Discovery+, Paramount+ and HBO Max continue to grow.
Earlier this year AWS launched AWS for M&E to serve the needs of professionals in the evolving and hyper-competitive M&E landscape. The initiative focuses on delivering purpose-built services and solutions from AWS and AWS Partners for content creators, rights holders, producers, broadcasters, and distributors. Envisioned to enhance every facet of the industry, AWS for M&E includes nine AWS Services, 11 AWS Solutions, dedicated AWS appliances, and more than 400 AWS Partner technologies, spanning five key solution areas: Content Production; Media Supply Chain & Archive; Broadcast; Direct-to-Consumer & Streaming; and Data Science & Analytics
Since its debut, the initiative has helped customers across the globe optimize technologies, power their highest-priority workloads, accelerate production launches, and see faster time to value. Solution-specific support from dedicated AWS industry specialists and AWS Professional Services teams as well as AWS Partners has also helped many customers accelerate cloud-based deployments. AWS for M&E Partners include Adobe, Arc XP, Autodesk, Deluxe, Dolby, Epic Games, Evertz, Grass Valley, Imagine Communications, Mission, Slalom, Sony Media Cloud Services, TrackIt, Teradici, and Wizeline.
AWS for M&E empowers customers to leverage the cloud for five key solution areas:
Content Production
Offering the most comprehensive set of cloud capabilities for content production, AWS for M&E lets studios spend more time creating. Customers can tap into the power of Amazon Nimble Studio for scalable rendering, use virtual workstations running industry standard creative applications, and leverage the compute capabilities ofAmazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). For custom setups, AWS offers tutorials to build a cloud-native creative studio with solutions such as AWS Studio in the Cloud. More than 40 AWS Partners offer content production solutions on AWS, including Autodesk, Adobe, Blackmagic Design, Epic Games, and Teradici.
Media Supply Chain & Archive
AWS for M&E offers Technology and Engineering Emmy® Award-winning solutions for content storage centralization, processing, creation, and distribution from ground to cloud. With these solutions, customers can easily optimize costs, reduce resource usage, and enhance collaboration. The AWS Content Analysis solution, for instance, combines the video transcribing capabilities of AWS Elemental MediaConvert with Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Translate, and Amazon Comprehend to streamline video archive cataloging and generate more meaningful metadata. Media2Cloud provides a simpler way to migrate video assets and associated metadata to the cloud with a serverless, end-to-end ingest workflow harnessing MediaConvert, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon CloudFront, and a range of AWS Machine Learning services. Customers such as Turner Broadcasting System have turned to AWS Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to secure media archives, and used other solutions available via more than 80 AWS Partners such as Dalet, SDVI, and Telestream.
Broadcast
AWS powers more than 2,900 broadcast channels worldwide for clients like FOX, ViacomCBS, and Discovery. With AWS for M&E broadcasters can find the services, appliances, and Partner solutions to pave a brighter future for live and VOD video delivery. The solutions facilitate low-latency broadcast workloads with unprecedented agility, elasticity, scalability, and reliability. For instance, with AWS Elemental MediaConnect and AWS Elemental Live, customers can easily build broadcast workflows on AWS for live events and 24/7 channels. AWS MediaConnect provides a hub for sharing, syndicating, and distributing content from AWS, while Statistical Multiplexing (Statmux) for AWS Elemental MediaLive makes it easy to deliver linear content, extract more bandwidth capacity from networks, ensure reliable 24/7 operations, and reduce the cost of linear video delivery ownership. Customers can choose from more than 35 AWS Partners for Broadcast technologies including Evertz, Grass Valley, and Imagine Communications.
Direct-to-consumer (D2C) & Streaming
AWS for M&E enables direct-to-consumer and streaming services like Netflix, Peacock, HULU, Prime Video, and many other entertainment streaming companies deliver, monetize, and support live and on-demand streaming with the utmost reliability. Services in this solution area include AWS MediaLive for broadcast-grade video processing and AWS MediaConvert for file-based video transcoding. The Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN) further enables customers to deliver massive VOD catalogs or live stream content easily to millions of viewers. More than 60 AWS Partners support direct-to-consumer and streaming workloads, including Evergent, Brightcove, and Irdeto.
Data Science & Analytics
From the National Football League (NFL) to Bundesliga to FORMULA 1, customers use AWS for M&E solutions to give audiences more control over their viewing experience while incorporating compelling real-time data visualizations. For example, billions of events a day can be efficiently ingested and analyzed with Amazon EMR, and unmatched machine learning (ML) capabilities can be used to segment audiences, forecast inventory, perform contextual analysis, and create more personalized experiences and recommendations. 15+ AWS database engines are accessible for analytics, with a range of use cases. 12 Artificial Intelligence (AI) services provide access to ready-made intelligence for unique applications and workflows, such as adding image and video analysis to applications using proven, highly scalable, deep learning technology with Amazon Rekognition, or automatically converting audio and video assets into fully searchable archives with Amazon Transcribe. EPAM, GrayMeta, and Veritone represent more than 30 AWS Partners that offer M&E analytics workloads solutions.
Inspired by continual innovation, AWS works to deliver new functionality to M&E customers and address the mission-critical demands they face in the field today, while also helping them prepare for the future.
For more details about AWS for M&E, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/media/.
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