For those pivoting to video, or others who are just getting started, Amazon Web Services released five new video tools built by AWS Elemental that make it easier to use cloud computing as the engine for video distribution.
The five tools announced Monday, just as the cloud industry descends upon Las Vegas for re:Invent 2017, allow publishers to deliver live video and video-on-demand to mobile devices without having to invest in the equipment required to accomplish that goal on their own, AWS said in a press release. The services are already being used by Amazon Prime Video as part of its commitment to live stream 11 National Football League games this season, the company said.
Video is a relative late-comer to the cloud, given the complexity of delivering video over the internet at scale and the investments publishers made into their own technology in the early days of video streaming. But, like any workload, there’s a strong argument for cloud computing among video publishers that are facing ever-growing cost concerns amid a fractured media landscape.
The services allow publishers to encode live video streams, compress them so they can be delivered to mobile devices, and add advertising to their videos, among other things. They are all available immediately, and more details can be found here.
The new services arrived exactly three months after the sudden death of AWS Elemental co-founder Sam Blackman, a Portland native who sold Elemental to Amazon for $296 million in 2015.
