Thanks to AWS Elemental, you can focus on the video content instead of the challenges of video distribution and scaling
Producing video content of any kind is a challenge. Not only do you have to shoot the content, but then you have to spend significant time editing and posting it online. Depending on the popularity of your content, you can quickly find yourself in a situation where your audience becomes frustrated because your video infrastructure isn’t able to keep up with the demand. Thankfully, Amazon Web Services has an answer for all your video scaling woes in its new service, AWS Elemental.
What is AWS Elemental?
AWS Elemental is a service that leverages the power of the Amazon Web Services infrastructure and software-based video processing, allowing media companies big or small to scale their content more quickly and efficiently. This allows AWS Elemental customers to scale up or down based on demand, both from a cost and bandwidth perspective.
Elemental’s cloud-based services are comprised of five different components, that when coupled together, should allow you to host and distribute the highest level of video content, regardless of your platform. These core Elemental cloud services include:
MediaConvert – Takes existing video content and converts it into multiple output formats to support viewing across a myriad of different platforms and devices.
MediaStore – An AWS based storage service that’s optimized to reduce latency for video content at scale.
MediaLive – Distributing live video content is extremely difficult, especially if you’re dealing with high demand. AWS Elemental MediaLive handles all of the encoding, scaling, and failover that are required to manage a live stream.
MediaTailor – Once your content has become successful, you’ll likely want to investigate monetization, which is where MediaTailor comes in. It allows you to easily insert highly personalized ads into your content on demand.
MediaPackage – The more successful your video content, the more important it is that you focus on security. MediaPackage allows you to create content once and have it distributed according to multiple content protection and delivery standards.
Pay-as-you-go pricing is key for scaling your video content
If you’re currently producing and hosting your video content on-premises, you’re likely aware of the significant expenses that are involved with the necessary servers and infrastructure required to host and distribute high-end video content. Thankfully, with a cloud video service like AWS Elemental, all of the complex hosting, encoding, and video distribution is handled in the cloud.
In addition, because of AWS’ flexible pricing model, you only pay for the amount of bandwidth and storage you use on a daily basis. This way if you’re just starting out, your video costs should be much less than the significant investment you would have to make if you were hosting all of your content in-house.
AWS Elemental allows video creators to compete with world-class video producers
The internet as a whole has leveled the playing field in a multitude of different industries. It used to be that only large, multinational companies had the resources and talent to create and distribute high-quality video content to the masses.
With cloud computing, organizations of all sizes are now able to leverage best-in-class technology to create, store, and distribute live and on-demand video to large audiences, across all different platforms. Whether your ideal viewer reaches your content online, or over the air, AWS Elemental gives you access to a full suite of cloud-based tools that will allow you to stay focused on creating engaging content instead of worrying about the complex infrastructure that’s required to distribute it.
Another benefit of using a cloud-based video platform like Elemental is that the success of your video content will not cause issues when it comes to the deliverability. Unfortunately, highly successful videos can pose a problem for organizations that rely on on-premises infrastructure. Imagine releasing a piece of video content that instantly goes viral. How would your existing in-house infrastructure be able to handle the multitude of requests that were required to serve the increase in popularity? If we’re all being honest, the answer is likely not very well. Thankfully with a platform like AWS Elemental, your increase in viewership wouldn’t even be an issue, because the platform is able to scale infinitely to ensure you’re not penalized for your success. If you attempted to meet the needs of this increase in traffic with your in-house infrastructure, you’d have to purchase expensive hardware and could be in trouble in the future if viewership dropped again. Thanks to solutions like Elemental, you only pay for the resources and bandwidth that you use at any given time.
Focus on the content, not the infrastructure
The beauty of cloud computing services is that they allow you to focus on the innovative and creative aspects of your business as opposed to the complex infrastructure, which often can be overwhelming. Gone are the days where only the largest media conglomerates could produce and scale video content. Thanks to solutions like AWS Elemental, you’ll be able to compete on creativity alone, which should be the true meaning of success when it comes to high-quality video content.
To learn more about AWS Elemental and how to go about migrating your existing content to the AWS platform, contact CloudHesive today by phone at 800-860-2040 or through our online contact form.
