Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides two over-the-top (OTT) live video streaming solutions to cost-effectively deliver media content to a global audience in the AWS Cloud. Both solutions build a highly available architecture that delivers a reliable real-time viewing experience. This page provides guidance to choose the live video streaming solution that best fits your business needs.
Live Streaming on AWS
This is a fully featured, customizable solution. Built with AWS Elemental MediaLive and AWS Elemental MediaPackage, this solution provides users with an uninterrupted live streaming experience by using a standard MediaLive channel with dual inputs and outputs as well as redundant inputs for MediaPackage.
This solution provides the following features:
Provides multiple output formats for playback support on different players and clients
Leverages MediaPackage to customize your workflow in a number of ways
Adds support for content protection using DRM
Enables DVR-like features such as live rewind and restart
Builds Live-to-VOD workflows
Live Streaming on AWS with MediaStore
This solution provides you with the fundamental tools and resources to deliver live video content. It replaces MediaPackage with AWS Elemental MediaStore for live stream origination.
This solution provides the following features:
Provides a simple solution with fewer customization options
Leverages MediaLive, using a single-pipeline channel, so only one input is required, and outputs are HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) only
The diagram below presents the serverless architecture you can automatically deploy using the solution's implementation guide and accompanying AWS CloudFormation template.
Live Streaming on AWS with MediaStore Solutions Implementation architecture
This solution deploys AWS Elemental MediaLive, which ingests an input feed and transcodes your content into one adaptive bitrate (ABR) HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) stream as output.
AWS Elemental MediaStore provides a scalable low-latency storage container to host the HLS segments from the MediaLive outputs.
Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to use the MediaStore custom endpoints as its origin. The CloudFront distribution delivers your live stream to viewers with low latency and high transfer speeds.
This solution also includes an Amazon CloudWatch dashboard that monitors the ingress and egress requests to AWS Elemental MediaStore, giving an overview of the health and performance of the live streaming workflow.
The diagram below presents the serverless architecture you can automatically deploy using the solution's implementation guide and accompanying AWS CloudFormation template.
Live Streaming on AWS Solutions Implementation architecture
The solution deploys AWS Elemental MediaLive, which ingests two input feeds and transcodes your content into two adaptive bitrate (ABR) HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) streams as output.
AWS Elemental MediaPackage ingests the MediaLive output and packages the live stream into HLS, Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), and Common Media Application Format (CMAF) formats that are delivered to three MediaPackage custom endpoints.
An Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to use the MediaPackage custom endpoints as its origin and includes a CDN identifier custom HTTP header to authenticate requests. The CloudFront distribution delivers your live stream to viewers with low latency and high transfer speeds.
The solution also includes a demo HTML preview player that you can use to test the solution. The player is a static website hosted in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. Amazon CloudFront is used to restrict access to the solution's website bucket contents.
Live Streaming on AWS provides automatic configurations
Automatically configure AWS Elemental MediaLive and AWS Elemental MediaPackage to encode and package your content for adaptive bitrate streaming across multiple screens.
Flexible solutions
Configure the solution to ingest Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP), Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP), HLS streams, or MediaConnect flows as input. Three encoding profiles are available during initial configuration.
Comprehensive AWS CloudFormation template
The solution’s AWS CloudFormation template launches the AWS products and services necessary to ingest, transcode, and deliver live streaming video.
Deploy a Solution yourself
Browse our library of AWS Solutions Implementations to get answers to common architectural problems.
