TV TOKYO Corporation Relaunches New Business Program on AWS

In April 2021, TV TOKYO, broadcaster of one of the strongest lineups of business news in Tokyo, overhauled its “TV TOKYO Business on Demand” subscription service, relaunching it as TERETO BIZ. AWS Media Services powers the new service, delivering live broadcasts and VOD, up to 10 live channels of critical economic news, and five times more streams than the old system.

TV TOKYO operates terrestrial and satellite broadcasting services—including a diverse lineup of business, animation, and variety content—in and around Tokyo.

The broadcaster relaunched its long-running Business on Demand service as TERETO BIZ in April 2021 to help revitalize Japanese business.

“We have been at the forefront of business with economic programs such as WBS (World Business Satellite), Gaia no Yoake and Cambria Palace. TERETO BIZ is designed to attract more viewers with our journalistic expertise,” says Keiichi Kuboi, director of TV TOKYO’s Broadcasting Business Center.

The new service has over 50,000 business videos, including VOD for popular programs, exclusive footage not broadcast on TV, commentaries by newscasters and reporters, and free daily news.

TERETO BIZ’s predecessor, Business on Demand, delivered on-demand video from a hosting server. In 2015, the company began simulcasting its Morning Satellite news program from 5:45 a.m., and in 2017, migrated its video delivery CMS from the hosting server to Amazon Web Services (AWS). In 2019, the broadcaster adopted AWS Media Services for Morning Satellite livestreams and on-demand viewing.

“The first 30 minutes of the show were broadcast at around 6:30, and a full archive went up after the show ended,“ says Shinsuke Hasegawa of TV TOKYO’s Broadcasting Business Center. “However, our viewers wanted to watch it while commuting, so we chose AWS for the DVR capabilities and time-shift playback of AWS Elemental MediaPackage and intuitive configuration settings for our engineers.”

TV TOKYO repurposed its existing video delivery CMS as backend API and modernized its front-end web infrastructure. The front end is now much more scalable thanks to container-based management with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Fargate.

“Containerization enables us to scale automatically, freeing us from the risk of server downtime as access volumes for news featured on our portal site spike,” explains Shinya Mochizuki, senior manager, System Solutions Dept., TV TOKYO Communications (TXCOM). “Preparation for our live coverage of the House of Representatives’ general election used to take a month—in 2021, it took only one week. Our operational workload is lower, and time spent responding to emergencies has been slashed.”

TERETO BIZ got off to a good start, buoyed by fresh news functions and growing excitement for live streaming. Its success inspired the company to begin developing a new live streaming system in June 2021, launching it in September.

“Specialized operators previously needed to spend several days on configuration before a livestream,” says Yujin Nishino, senior manager, Data & UX Design, Media business Development Division, TXCOM. “But now, even our newsroom directors can control our new, simplified livestream management system. And we’ve increased our number of contingency channels from 2 to 10.”

The new system simplifies operations by interacting with the live management system and AWS Media Services via APIs to provide a new screen-based workflow with start/stop triggers for live video processing using AWS Elemental MediaLive. To avoid adding cost, additional functions automatically start and stop AWS Elemental MediaLive before and after streams.

“Having 10 live channels and the ability for newsroom directors to stream has increased our number of live feeds by about 500 percent,” says Nishino. “And being able to respond to impromptu government press conferences and emergency announcements from the Japan Meteorological Agency has greatly improved our mobility.”

Developing the live streaming system through an offshore company wasn’t a problem for TV TOKYO. “The wealth of technical information, innumerable expert developers, and smooth offshore development reminded us that AWS is a worldwide service,” says Masaki Hayashi, senior expert, Data & UX Design, Media business Development Division, TXCOM. “Our new system has been perfectly stable and offers flexibility to add features when needed.”

With AWS Media Services as the video delivery platform, the company can stream video with a pay-as-you-go fee structure, and the convenient connection functions of Amazon CloudFront make delivery efficient and inexpensive.

“We chose AWS Media Services and other AWS services because they seemed like the best choice for reliable delivery infrastructure. But AWS really proved itself by covering areas that we can't address on our own, such as ensuring scalability and stability for access spikes,” explains Kuboi.

TERETO BIZ will continue to provide engaging content and superior customer experience to meet end-user needs and gain more paid subscribers.

“We’re making our business programming and news more interactive with chat functions and livestreams linked to events,” says Hasegawa.

AWS not only helped deploy the system, but it’s also helping TV TOKYO enhance content through regular discussions on specific stories and general ideas. “As technology evolves, we’re looking forward to AWS providing services that are even easier to use, creating more use case information, and further enhancing the capabilities of the Amazon IVS live delivery solution,” concludes Mochizuki.

To learn more, visit AWS for Media & Entertainment.