AWS for M&E Blog

See the agenda: AWS Insights Online Conference

Join us May 28 and June 2 for a deep dive on the latest innovations in media technology with AWS customers, partners, and media experts. The conference agenda is now live, featuring four educational tracks spanning the M&E supply chain.

Sign up to see breakthrough workflows and hear perspectives from industry leaders in 14 half-hour conference sessions. You can also catch demos of new solutions, connect with an expert in the Ask an Architect Lounge, or visit our Training and Certification booth.

Click here to register.

A table of the agenda including the track and session names

Conference Agenda

Opening Keynote

Cloud City: A+E Network’s Cloud Journey and Lessons Learned
As storytellers, media companies are using the cloud to reach audiences around the world with inspiring tales. This session shares the cloud journey of A+E Networks, a global media and entertainment company with iconic brands like A&E, History, and Lifetime. Attendees will learn the business drivers that prompted A+E Networks to shift from on-premises technology to deploying more than 90% of their infrastructure on the cloud, as well as lessons about culture, organizational structure, and technology.

Track One: Content Production

Making a Movie in a Day: Project Lederhosen
At the HPA Tech Retreat 2020, several technology companies came together to create a short, cinematic-style movie, in a single day. This first-of-its-kind collaboration brought together by Joachim Zell, VP of Technology at EFilm serves to illustrate the value of cloud-enabled production environments to allow creatives to build content regardless of geography. This session will review this ambitious project with a focus on the technologies that made it possible using a common foundation of AWS services, including the application of AWS Local Zones and globally accessible content lake architecture.

Editing in the Cloud on AWS
Legacy production models that rely on traditional content creation tools cannot keep pace with the growing number of distribution options or the increased demand for fresh content. In this session, experts share insights on content development and content security as well as deployment strategies to enable editorial workloads in the cloud.

Creating Digital Content with Virtual Workstations
In this session, attendees will learn how to set up a powerful, cloud-based GPU workstation with AWS. Running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) G4 instances, AWS virtual workstations enable remote collaboration for animation and visual effects, allowing users to scale their teams on-demand. Follow along as an artist goes through the process of launching a cloud-based Linux workstation to utilize the digital content creation tool, Blender. The session will provide additional resources to walk through this process step-by-step and instructions for setting up a full content production pipeline on AWS.

Track Two: Broadcast in the Cloud

Exploring an Award-winning Media Supply Chain
Discovery, FOX NE&O (Walt Disney Television), AWS, SDVI Corporation, and Evertz Technologies were recently recognized with a Technology and Engineering Emmy award for pioneering a public cloud-based media supply chain for content ingest, management, and delivery. This session will examine how Discovery Communications uses the cloud to meet their customers’ rapidly changing demands with the SDVI media supply chain platform and AWS compute, storage, and media services.

Bringing Live Production to the Cloud
Explore the final frontier of broadcast technology. Virtualized live production promises to bring flexibility and cost reductions to newscasting, sportscasting, and live unscripted productions. This session will discuss technical obstacles to live production in the cloud, explore developments underway at AWS to unlock this capability, and share insights from industry leader Grass Valley.

Broadcast Distribution Moves to the Cloud
Broadcasters can now distribute their network or station signals to affiliates or MPVDs via the AWS Cloud. This session explains how AWS Elemental Media Services can be used to create broadcast-grade content for primary and secondary distribution. Learn how AWS Elemental MediaLive and statistical multiplexing create industry standard, multi-program transport streams (MPTS) for distribution via traditional technologies such as satellite or fiber as well as terrestrial distribution services such as AWS Elemental MediaConnect.

Track Three: Content Distribution

Live on CloudFront: The World’s Biggest Sporting Events
Global live events place unprecedented demand on media technology to deliver the most valuable content with reliability, performance, security, and quality. In this session, learn how our customers and partners are using Amazon CloudFront to distribute content to millions of live viewers around the world.

Live Video to the Cloud with AWS Elemental Link
Remote contribution of live video to the cloud is challenging. Video must be reliably and securely transported over congested networks, troubleshooting in the field can be difficult, hardware can be hard to transport and install, and purchasing and deploying devices for one-off events can be cost prohibitive. Learn how AWS has made it fast, easy, and inexpensive to purchase, set up, and manage AWS Elemental Link, a portable device that delivers high-quality video to AWS Elemental MediaLive for streaming to your viewers.

Building a Live Interactive Video Experience for Your Business
Recent years have seen explosive growth in live streaming. Adding interactive functionality, such as polls and chats, to online live video engages audience and provides a better lean-forward experience. In this session, learn how AWS can help make interactive live video simple, so you can focus on innovation to differentiate your business, instead of managing video infrastructure.

Track Four: Machine Learning

Machine Learning for Media & Entertainment
Changing consumption models and viewer preferences are fueling a continuous evolution in content and service offerings. Building stronger relationships with your audiences means better understanding them. In this session, learn how analytics and machine learning are helping media organizations around the world enhance viewer engagement, deliver personalized experiences, and better monetize their offerings. Explore the full stack of AWS machine learning applications for content creation, distribution, post-production, and the entire media supply chain, and learn how you can get started building more intelligent workflows and services.

Enhance your content library with ML-based search and recommendation
Personalizing the user experience and improving the ability to search for content are proven to increase discoverability, user engagement, satisfaction, and revenue opportunities. A number of factors, from ever-shifting content catalogs to rapid changes in user behavior, make it difficult to bring these experiences to life for your audiences. In this session, discover common techniques media organizations have successfully implemented to deliver personalized content recommendations and user experiences, and learn practical approaches to implementing them with AWS machine learning services.

Enhancing Content Intelligence with Media Insights Engine
To compete in an increasingly dynamic marketplace, media & entertainment organizations are looking for ways to extend the reach and value of their content. Advancements in machine learning have unlocked strategies that make content libraries more searchable and accessible and easier to adapt for new markets and monetization opportunities. In this session, learn how to leverage the Media Insights Engine to extract metadata and enable efficient, scalable workflows for subtitling, content monetization, moderation and redaction, and more.