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PBS on AWS

Overview

PBS has over 330 member stations and reaches 100 million people through television and 32 million people online monthly with diverse education and entertainment programming and applications. PBS innovates using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring its annual Short Film Festival to a virtual format, improve the performance of video streams, enhance its archives with deep search functionality, and more using artificial intelligence (AI). Since using Amazon CloudFront (CloudFront) content delivery network, PBS has experienced 50 percent fewer streaming errors. PBS delivers nearly all of its video streaming through CloudFront, averaging more than 70 PB of content delivered monthly. Using the cloud, PBS drives its mission of being a trusted window to the world forward by innovating from its backend operations to its content delivery.

PBS's Cloud Journey on AWS

About PBS

PBS’s mission is to serve the American public with trusted programming and resources that educate, entertain, and inspire, and provide a diversity of perspectives. The publicly funded, nonprofit public broadcaster and television program distributor was founded in 1969 and is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. It is the most prominent provider of educational programming to public television stations in the United States. Delivering its streaming content using AWS Media Solutions and CloudFront helps PBS speed its content delivery, personalize recommendations using ML, and build new, innovative experiences such as its “Screen on the Green” virtual reality Short Film Festival in 2021. Building on the cloud, PBS optimizes its user experience and delivers on its mission to be a trusted window to the world.

Additional Resources

2024 | PBS modernizes its video encoding workflow with AWS Elemental MediaConvert

By building on Amazon Web Services (AWS), PBS is able to continually innovate while delivering high-quality broadcast and streaming content. In 2023, PBS began a library re-encoding initiative using AWS Elemental MediaConvert, a file-based video transcoding service, to improve the experience for viewers both in terms of visual quality and faster download times.

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Screenshot of a PBS video streaming interface displaying popular shows such as Nature, Antiques Roadshow, American Experience, Great Performances, and PBS NewsHour, along with various video thumbnails.

2021 | PBS Drives Content Engagement with Amazon Personalize

With thousands of PBS programs, it can be a challenge to surface the most relevant options to dedicated and new viewers using traditional algorithms. Using Amazon Personalize—a service that enables developers to build applications with machine learning (ML) technology for real-time personalized recommendations—PBS quickly implemented a recommendation engine that drives engagement with PBS's trusted content.

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PBS drives content engagement with Amazon Personalize featuring Mikey Centrella, Director of Product Management at PBS, and Veena Chandran, Solutions Architect at AWS. USE101

2023 | Creating Inclusive Programming with PBS

PBS builds on AWS to deliver relevant content for viewers of all ages, create new programs that bring diverse voices and perspectives forward, and improve accessibility so virtually everyone has the opportunity to learn and grow with PBS. To learn more about how PBS uses AWS to advance its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals, the Fix This team sat down with Sylvia Bugg, chief programming executive and general manager of general audience programming at PBS.

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2021 | PBS Takes 10th Annual PBS Short Film Festival Virtual Using AWS

The annual PBS Short Film Festival is part of a multi-platform initiative to increase the reach and visibility of independent filmmakers from across the United States and amplify the voices of diverse content creators. In 2021, PBS brought the festival to a new virtual format. To make the virtual reality (VR) experience possible, the Digital Innovation team at PBS created an immersive WebXR beta experience, “Screen on the Green,” using AWS Media Services, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and CloudFront.

Read the blog »
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