AWS | Community | Video Streaming - Live Video Streaming

Overview

Live video streaming refers to delivering video content to viewers in real-time or near-real-time, enabling experiences like watching live sports, attending virtual conferences, or participating in interactive broadcasts. This technology powers diverse applications across industries, including: Broadcasting (Television channels and news networks), corporate communications (Company-wide meetings and training sessions), entertainment (Game streaming and online concerts), and user-generated content (Social media live streaming platforms).

This article helps you to design a live video streaming architecture across the workflow's core components:

Content ingest: The secure transfer of high-quality video and audio streams from your source (studio, camera, or encoder) to AWS infrastructure.
Content processing - transcoding: converts your source video into multiple formats and bitrates in real-time. This Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming technology automatically adjusts video quality based on each viewer's device capabilities and network conditions, ensuring smooth playback across smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.
Content processing - packaging: segments your transcoded streams into files and creates manifest files for HTTP(S) delivery using different formats, such as HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH), Common Media Application Format (CMAF) and Microsoft Smooth Streaming (MSS). Since HTTP(S) provides reliable transport with excellent CDN support, it offers the most cost-effective and scalable approach to live content delivery. Alternative delivery protocols can be considered in certain cases, such as WebRTC for ultra-low latency, but they are out of scope of the current article.
Content origination: Your transcoded and packaged content is hosted in locations accessible to Content Delivery Networks via HTTP(S). This origin storage enables CDNs to retrieve content on-demand using a pull-based system.
Content delivery: Global distribution through CDNs that cache your content at edge locations worldwide, reducing latency and improving viewer experience regardless of geographic location.

Depending on the vendors you are using, multiples components can sometimes be offered within the same product. For example, some ABR encoders also perform packaging, and some packaging servers also act as origin servers.

Architectural decisions

When designing a live streaming workflow, you'll need to make several important architectural decisions that will impact your solution's performance, scalability, cost, and user experience. These decisions are interconnected and should be considered holistically, as choices in one area will influence your options in others. Below are the key architectural components you'll need to evaluate and configure for your streaming infrastructure. For a first hands-on experience in building simple Live video workflow consider the AWS Elemental MediaLive Workflow Wizard.

Choose your ingest method

Your content source determines the optimal ingest approach. AWS offers multiple native options: Elemental Live is best for Professional studios with existing infrastructure, MediaLive Anywhere for flexible deployment with cloud based management, Elemental Link for simple and portable event based streaming device, and MediaConnect Gateway for multicast network integration.

	Elemental Live	MediaLive Anywhere	Elemental Link	Elemental MediaConnect Gateway
Deployment	On-premises	Hybrid	Hybrid	Hybrid
Cloud control	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
24/7 streaming	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Input types	SDI, SMPTE2022-6, SMPTE2110, UDP/RTP, RTSP, RTMP pull/push, HLS pull, SRT caller, MediaConnect	SDI, UDP/RTP	SDI, HDMI	UDP/RTP
Output types	DASH, HLS, MSS, CMAF, RTMP, UDP/RTP, Zixi, SRT MediaConnect, Frame capture	CMAF, Frame capture, HLS, MSS, RTMP, UDP/RTP	MediaLive, MediaConnect (for Link UHD only)	Media Connect
Pay as you go	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Bring your own hardware	No	Yes	No	Yes

Define your encoding strategy

Build a custom solution using FFmpeg libraries to have maximum control at the expense of significant development and maintenance overhead, or opt for a managed cloud service like AWS Elemental MediaLive. It provides broadcast-grade managed transcoding with features like real-time quality optimization, automatic failover and redundancy, built-in monitoring and alerting and support for professional broadcast standards.

You also need to define the desired output video properties such as bitrates, frame rates, video/audio codecs, and formats. This decision involves balancing processing costs, device compatibility, and the Quality of Experience (QoE) for viewers. Read more about Video Quality in AWS Elemental MediaLive.

Select the most appropriate packaging and origination service

Once you decide about the video formats you want to make available to your viewers (e.g., DASH, HLS, CMAF, MSS), decide whether you want to choose a simple, basic and cost effective storage service like Amazon S3 or more sophisticated packaging service like AWS Elemental MediaPackage.

Compared to S3, MediaPackage offers advanced features like DRM integration, time-shift viewing/DVR, Live to VOD asset creation, high availability with built-in redundancy (multi region), advanced filtering capability, built-in stream protection and access control, and low latency capabilities (LL-HLS).

Design your content delivery

Decide whether you want to implement a multi-CDN strategy and choose your CDNs like Amazon CloudFront. Your content delivery strategy will depend on your goals of service availability, quality of experience, while reducing cost and complexity.

Choose a content monetization option

Choose from subscriptions, pay-per-view, or in-stream advertising. For in-stream ads, consider integrating SCTE markers into your video stream to trigger mid-roll ads, in addition to pre-roll or post-roll ads. For more on monetization strategies, refer to this page.

Ensure content security

Rights owners often legally oblige distributors to protect content from unauthorized access to maintain distribution rights. In addition, distributors are incentivized to protect premium content from piracy to recoup through monetization the expensive costs of acquiring and delivering it.

Protecting premium content usually requires multiple security layers, such as CDN-level tokenization to prevents unauthorized downloads by requiring valid tokens for content access, Integration with industry-standard Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems (FairPlay, Widevine, PlayReady) using the SPEKE protocol to control playback authorization, and watermarking to track pirated content back to its source, supporting legal enforcement actions.

Monitor your video streaming solution

AWS provides workflow monitor for live video, a media-centric tool to simplify and elevate the monitoring of your video workloads. Accessible via the AWS Elemental MediaLive console and API, workflow monitor discovers and visualizes resources. It creates signal maps showing video across AWS Elemental MediaConnect, AWS Elemental MediaLive, and AWS Elemental MediaPackage along with Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront to provide end-to-end visibility. With the workflow monitor, you can create your own alarm templates or start from a set of recommended alarms, and build custom templates for alarm notifications.

While server-side monitoring provides basic insights, client-side monitoring offers the best QoE visibility, such as the percentage playbacks impacted by buffering events. Options include:

Building a custom solution
Integrating third-party SDK’s (e.g., Mux, DataZoom) into your player
Implementing Common Media Client Delivery (CMCD) to relay client-side metrics to CDN logs, like with CloudFront.

Common solutions for live video streaming

Managed solutions

If you prefer to procure a fully managed live video workflow instead of building your own, consider the following options:

Managed solutions from the AWS Marketplace, such as Insys and M2A. When you go this path, make sure to thoroughly evaluate the solution. For example, it's scalability, reliability, performance, price model, video encoding options, content protection features, monetization options, integration through APIs, analytics and reporting, documentation, etc..
Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) is a managed live streaming solution by AWS that makes low-latency or real-time video available to viewers around the world, allowing you to create engaging live experiences. Check Amazon IVS demos on this page. The service is particularly suited for scenarios where real-time interaction is essential for connecting with target audiences. You can easily customize and enhance the audience experience through the Amazon IVS player SDK and timed metadata APIs, allowing you to build a more valuable relationship with your viewers on your own websites and applications. However, consider the limitations of this service, such as the support for DRM, multiple streaming format support, or multi audio support.

AWS provides ready-to-deploy solutions for live video streaming, over-the-top (OTT) and UGC offerings based on AWS building blocks, including code, and configuration.

AWS solution for web streaming

AWS provides ready-to-deploy solutions for live video streaming, over-the-top (OTT) and UGC offerings based on AWS building blocks such as AWS Media Services , including code, and configuration. This solution is recommended for basic streaming use cases where advanced requirements such as multiple streaming protocols support, DRM content protection, Live to VoD capabilities is not required. It provides the following features:

Automatically configures MediaLive and Amazon S3 to encode and originate your content for adaptive bitrate streaming across multiple screens via HTTP Live Streaming (HLS).
Provides an elastic, highly available, global content delivery network for live video streaming using Amazon CloudFront.
Supports four input types (RTP_PUSH, RTMP_PUSH, URL_PULL, and INPUT_DEVICE) as the source for your video stream, including a device input so you can use an AWS Elemental Link as the source for the input for your live channel.

AWS solution for advanced live video streaming

This solution is recommended for more advanced streaming use cases where advanced requirements such as multiple streaming protocols support, DRM content protection, Live to VoD capabilities may be required. It offers provides the following features:

Encodes and packages your content for adaptive bitrate streaming across multiple screens via HTTP live streaming (HLS), Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), and Common Media Application Format (CMAF) by automatically configuring AWS Elemental MediaLive and AWS Elemental MediaPackage. Using AWS Elemental MediaPackage, this solution supports the standards and formats commonly used to stream video, such as CMAF, HLS, and DASH, for playback support on different media players.
Using AWS Elemental MediaLive, this solution supports two input feeds and it’s ideal for customers looking to add redundancy to their live feeds.
The solution supports URL_PULL, RTMP_PUSH, RTMP_PULL, RTP_PUSH, and MediaConnect inputs with redundancy.
Using this solution, you can apply just-in-time content protection to secure your live streams by integrating with multiple Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies. Protection capabilities are standards-based, including support for Apple FairPlay, Widevine, and Microsoft PlayReady using AES-128 encryption
Provides an elastic, highly available, global content delivery network for live video streaming using Amazon CloudFront.

Low level implementation

In certain cases, you might have very specific requirements that are not met by any of the aforementioned solutions, e.g. uncommon ingest protocol or video processing requirements. In this case, you can build your solution from scratch using open source software and AWS core services (storage, compute, databases & networking services).

Resources

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Video Streaming - Live Video Streaming

Learn how to build scalable live video streaming workflows using AWS services, from content ingestion and processing to global delivery and monetization.