Posted On: Mar 10, 2021

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams (KVS) updates the service quota model for its media playback APIs to throttle based on the number of fragments requested rather than the number of playback sessions. This gives developers the flexibility to enable up to 10x more simultaneous playback sessions for applications that use Kinesis Video Streams for live or on-demand playback.

Developers can use simple playback APIs to enable HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) or Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) based live or on-demand playback for media streamed to a Kinesis video stream. Previously, these APIs were throttled by the rate at which they were called and applications were limited to a maximum of 10 live or on-demand simultaneous playback sessions. This limit for maximum playback sessions is now removed and replaced with the new quota model, in which the HLS and DASH APIs are rate-limited across all sessions by the number of fragment metadata and the number of media fragments requested. This gives developers the flexibility to create 100 or more simultaneous playback sessions by programmatically selecting the size of metadata and number of media fragments.

In addition to more simultaneous sessions, KVS API for session creation rate limits are updated to 25 requests per second. This allows developers to create more playback sessions quickly (e.g., an application can now create 10 playback sessions in 1 second whereas previously creating 10 sessions would take 6 seconds). Finally, this change also enables developers to request up to 5x longer playlists for on-demand playback and avoid frequent playlist refreshes.  

To learn more about this new service quota model, please refer to the developer documentation.  

Refer to the AWS global region table for Amazon Kinesis Video Streams availability.