AWS for M&E Blog
AWS Elemental MediaLive offers statistical multiplexing for better broadcast quality, performance, and bandwidth management
Statistical Multiplexing (Statmux) is now available with AWS Elemental MediaLive. Statmux is a technology used in live broadcast workflows that allocates bits in real time among multiple live video channels. It instantaneously adjusts the bitrate of each channel in the statmux pool to make the best use of total available bandwidth and combines the encoded outputs into a single transport stream. This maximizes network efficiency by optimizing picture quality for a group of channels within a fixed total bandwidth.
Using AWS Elemental MediaLive with Statmux, customers can now deploy linear video processing and playout in the AWS Cloud for broadcast, cable, or terrestrial distribution.
Media companies, such as national broadcasters, originate live content and simultaneously share that content with their distribution partners. Traditionally, this has been accomplished by preparing channels for distribution using purpose-built, on-premises hardware encoders. These systems can take months to procure and configure, require extensive engineering to operate reliably, and cannot be repurposed once deployed. AWS Elemental MediaLive with Statmux lets broadcasters and content providers build and manage broadcast video workflows on fully managed AWS services and gain flexibility, reduce hardware and management costs, and deliver high quality video with built-in reliability.
Key benefits of Statmux for AWS Elemental MediaLive include:
- Cloud flexibility—Add, remove, or update live channels based on evolving audience and business needs, easily introduce new codecs, prioritize resources on a per-channel basis, and take advantage of multiple codecs and resolutions.
- Built-in resiliency—Resources are automatically allocated across multiple availability zones for high availability and fully managed failover.
- High video quality—Statmux for MediaLive lets you maximize video quality while optimizing for fixed satellite or cable distribution bandwidth. And, you can tune quality settings on a per-channel basis without disruption to assure that the highest-priority channels maintain the highest quality.
- Operational efficiency—Build broadcast distribution workloads in minutes, without on-premises hardware, and deliver channels more efficiently over fixed network bandwidth.
- Monitoring and metrics—Integrated Amazon CloudWatch monitoring enables real-time views of video metrics and multiplexer performance.
- Unified headend—For content providers that distribute traditional broadcast video as well as multiscreen linear video, Statmux for MediaLive can deliver both through a single architecture. With the increasing importance of OTT delivery, having one system to manage all encoding can dramatically simplify operations.
Learn more about how customers are saving time, reducing overhead, maximizing low-cost cloud resources, and maintaining optimized picture quality with Statmux for AWS Elemental MediaLive here: https://aws.amazon.com/medialive/features/statmux