AWS for M&E Blog

See how FOX uses AWS solutions at scale to pioneer live and on-demand content delivery

FOX Corporation (FOX) produces and distributes news, sports, and entertainment content. Millions of viewers engage with content from FOX through its broadcast and over-the-top (OTT) platforms. FOX pioneers live and on-demand media content delivery and production using cloud-based solutions including: storage, compute, machine learning (ML), media solutions, and databases from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

After migrating roughly 8 PB of content from its on-premises storage to AWS in 6 weeks, FOX has greater functionality and flexibility in processing and distributing programming quickly via the FOX MediaCloud platform. FOX also innovates in its approach to stress-testing for large, high-profile live events, such as the Super Bowl LIV. Using AWS, FOX can deliver the content with little or no drop-off on game day for millions of viewers. FOX also enhances sports narratives with ML-powered natural language, using Amazon SageMaker.

“Working with AWS, we’ve reinvented how we produce and distribute content to our consumers across all platforms and devices using the cloud. We’ve transformed our existing operation, but more importantly, we’ve laid the tracks for the future in a way that will help us innovate and adapt for many years to come.”

Paul Cheesbrough
Chief Technology Officer and President of Digital, Fox Corporation

Learn how FOX builds on AWS to achieve big business outcomes and transform the media and entertainment industry. Following are some highlights from FOX’s cloud journey:

FOX Corporation Delivers Content to Millions by Building FOX MediaCloud on AWS

When an acquisition in early 2019 required the separation of assets, FOX turned to AWS to help replicate its preexisting MediaCloud platform. To help its lean technical team handle high volumes of data and file-transcoding and file-sharing needs, the American media distributor sought to build a more versatile solution than its legacy on-premises system could deliver. FOX used Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and other AWS services to make the ingestion, transcoding, and delivery of content as seamless as possible. On AWS, FOX was also able to create a centralized repository of searchable assets.

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/fox-mediacloud/

Enhancing Sports Narratives with Natural Language Generation Using Amazon SageMaker

To improve the broadcasting experience, FOX Sports turns to AWS and its artificial intelligence technologies to convert real-time data into easy-to-understand narratives for commentators and audiences. The Amazon ML Solutions Lab partnered with FOX Sports to design and implement an end-to-end ML system using natural language generation, a technique to generate natural language descriptions from structured data. The objective of the partnership is to produce more natural-sounding narratives, compared to rule-based templates, in a scalable fashion.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/enhance-sports-narratives-with-natural-language-generation-using-amazon-sagemaker/

Leveraging the scale and reliability of AWS, FOX fosters innovation by building new ways to produce and deliver media. Get more insights on how FOX continues to innovate by building on AWS by visiting its Innovator page.

Petra Lewis

Petra Lewis

Petra E. Lewis is a content specialist for the Global Customer References Program (GCRP)'s Storytelling group at AWS. She is a seasoned marketing communications professional who worked in financial services prior to entering tech. Her last financial services role was vice president and head of Internal Communications for a top-10 global investment bank.