AWS direct-to-consumer streaming Partners’ showcase at NAB 2023

Many organizations in the Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to reinvent their media workloads in the cloud. At the 100^th Anniversary NAB Show 2023 in Las Vegas, AWS Partners showcased solutions addressing the entire direct-to-consumer cycle. Following are some highlights that AWS M&E Partners demonstrated during the show.

Accedo showcased an on-screen shopping experience for sports leagues and broadcasters, converting viewers into shoppers. Mimicking how influencers use video on social media to drive conversion towards their product, service providers have the opportunity create a new space to interact with their audience. In this space, providers can introduce sponsors and merchandise within a compelling context where TV-lovers can discover and purchase products and engage in a new experience with the service. Using AWS Machine Learning engine, this solution removes the complexity of getting started and enables an automated editorial process at scale.

Amagi Media Labs demonstrated its free ad-supported TV (FAST) 2.0 vision in partnership with ThinkAnalytics and Accedo. This experience featured advanced UX and personalization capabilities as part of Amagi’s broader FAST 2.0 agenda of bringing on-demand streaming-like experiences to cable-like content. Powered by ThinkAnalytics’ recommendation engine, Amagi delivered personalized content, including individualized channels and personalized electronic programming guide (EPG), layout, and optimized channels. This highly engaging, viewer-centric experience was shown within Accedo’s video solution.

Ateme introduced an end-to-end low-latency OTT video delivery workflow, leveraging Arm-based AWS Graviton3 compute instances, based on AWS Well Architected Framework. Ateme solutions are fully cloud-native and include multiple AWS components such as Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, and more, depending on customer requirements. Ateme’s solutions are easy to deploy with Infrastructure-as-Code or can be purchased a Software-as-a-Service with Ateme+.

Bitmovin demonstrated its live and VOD encoding optimized for cost-efficient video delivery to any device. Bitmovin Player provides exceptional viewing experiences on all devices and platforms. Bitmovin Analytics delivers deep, actionable insights to increase viewer engagement and retention. Bitmovin customers leverage Amazon S3 for storage or video origin, AWS Elemental MediaTailor to monetize streaming video, and Amazon CloudFront to globally distribute content. Bitmovin’s live encoding and VOD encoding are also available in AWS Marketplace.

Brightcove, together with Evergent and SpringServe, showcased end-to-end streaming capabilities via its Media Studio service. This solution allows media organizations to reach and monetize global audiences with cost-efficient localized playback, regional subscription offers, and yield-optimized advertising in a single, tightly integrated offering. Working together, Evergent offers a SaaS-based subscription and customer lifecycle management service deployed on AWS while SpringServe offers a customizable set of ad serving and optimization features built to manage every aspect of a publisher’s video advertising business.

Conviva demonstrated its platform that provides comprehensive, continuous, census-level measurement through real-time, server-side sessionization at scale. It includes time-state analytics and AI automated data modeling. Using a single full stack sensor at the source, coupled with a single big data pipeline, it enables streaming businesses to acquire, engage, monetize, and retain audiences.

The AWS Elemental MediaTailor service from AWS was showcased with new, user friendly ad formats to monetize live streams and video on demand to complement existing in-break pre-roll and mid-roll advertising formats with minimal interruption to the viewing experience. Research shows that a 30 second in-break ad combined with new ad formats can increase brand awareness by 67%, which is appealing to advertisers. The demonstration showed side-by-side screen comparisons to illustrate ad format wraparounds (such as overlays, side-by-side, squeeze backs, L bands, and more) and ad formats embedded within the scene (in the form of virtual product placements). The showcase was supported by creative-ad-serving partners Innovid and TripleLift, and SpringServe‘s ad decision server, with video player development provided by Castlabs.

Endeavor Streaming showcased its full suite of platform technologies, featuring global partners like the UFC, Edmonton Oilers, NYFW, and more as real client use cases. The platform uses AWS cloud-based services Amazon Route 53, Amazon Aurora, Amazon EC2, and Amazon SQS, to provide reliable global video delivery and massive processing ability during live events. Endeavor Streaming also introduced its new self-service analytics dashboards powered by Amazon Kinesis and Amazon Redshift.

Harmonic demonstrated its VOS®360 video SaaS platform on AWS for live sports streaming with low latency HLS and server-side ad insertion (SSAI). The VOS360 platform uses Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS, Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Elastic Load Balances, Route53, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Direct Connect, and AWS Lambda.

Irdeto demonstrated its anti-piracy services built with AWS services including AWS Elemental MediaLive, EKS, Amazon RDS, Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Kinesis and Amazon Route 53. Irdeto offers a suite of solutions to protect content rightsholders from unauthorized use of their assets and live event content.

LiveLike showcased its dynamic, secure, and scalable platform that operates globally. With access to a range of powerful AWS services, including Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Aurora, and Amazon SQS, LiveLike is able to deliver immersive and high-performing media experiences that are reliable and fast. LiveLike clients can trust that their data and applications are secure, and benefit from the robust security measures and advanced features provided by AWS.

NAGRA presented its content protection and multiscreen solutions that operate across the production to distribution value chain. These include NexGuard forensic watermarking for content production and streaming solutions using OpenTV video platform. NAGRA solutions use a number of AWS services including Amazon EC2, Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon EKS.

New Relic demonstrated end-to-end observability of a VOD reference architecture consisting of AWS Elemental MediaConvert, AWS Elemental MediaPackage, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Step Functions, AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon SQS, and Amazon SNS via New Relic’s AWS integrations. In addition, the entire customer journey was monitored by New Relic Browser, APM, and Synthetics, providing a complete picture of the user experience and service performance.

Radio.Cloud created a fully-automated radio broadcast, “Show Radio,” that ran throughout NAB 2023 with music, host transitions, and other content. The audio output was encoded for live streaming in AWS Elemental MediaLive with a pre-roll announcement inserted with AWS Elemental MediaTailor and heard by users when starting the stream playback. The experience highlighted the ease of configuring and operating a fully automated broadcast radio station in Radio.Cloud while delivering customized messaging or advertising to streaming listeners. Additionally, Radio.Cloud won NAB Radio Product of the Year and RADIO World Best of Show awards for its Live Studio solution.

Synamedia showcased Vivid Cloud Workflows with a low-latency live OTT streaming demo running on AWS infrastructure. In the live sports game streaming demonstration, the visitor experienced the benefits of Vivid LL-OTT and MPEG-DASH low-latency delivery on a multi-camera feed with nearly imperceptible delay.

ThinkAnalytics featured its Think360 personalization content discovery, hyper-targeted advertising, and viewer insights platform designed to drive engagement, increase viewing time, and grow revenue for both direct-to-consumer (D2C) and FAST providers as both a standalone demonstration as well as part of the collaboration solution with Amagi, Accedo, and AWS.