AWS for Media & Entertainment – Helping customers reinvent the industry with purpose-built services, solutions, and partners

Media and entertainment customers face industry-wide transformation, with companies reinventing how they create content, optimize media supply chains, and compete for audience attention across streaming, broadcast, and direct-to-consumer platforms. Industry leaders such as Netflix, FORMULA 1, Discovery, and Disney use the cloud to pioneer new ways to entertain—launching new streaming services, expanding their content catalogs, and setting new standards with audiences for viewing experiences.

To help customers through this phase, today we’re excited to introduce “AWS for Media & Entertainment,” an initiative featuring new and existing services and solutions from AWS and AWS Partners, built specifically for content creators, rights holders, producers, broadcasters, and distributors. AWS for Media & Entertainment (M&E) aligns the most purpose-built capabilities of any cloud—including nine AWS Services, 11 AWS Solutions, dedicated AWS appliances, and more than 400 AWS Partners—against five solution areas to help customers transform M&E: Content Production; Media Supply Chain & Archive; Broadcast; Direct-to-Consumer & Streaming; and Data Science & Analytics. It also adds the newly announced Amazon Nimble Studio, a service that enables customers to set up creative studios in hours instead of weeks, to the AWS portfolio of purpose-built media and entertainment services that includes AWS Elemental MediaPackage, AWS Elemental MediaConnect, AWS Elemental MediaLive, AWS Elemental MediaConvert, AWS Elemental MediaStore, AWS Elemental MediaTailor, and Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS).

The initiative makes it easier for media and entertainment customers to select the right tools and partners for their highest-priority workloads, accelerate production launches, and see faster time to value. For customers looking to accelerate deployments with solution-specific support, AWS for Media & Entertainment also establishes dedicated AWS industry specialists and AWS Professional Services teams across each solution area, and identifies leading AWS Technology Partners and Consulting Partners in each area—including AWS Partners such as Adobe, Arc XP, Autodesk, Deluxe, Dolby, Epic Games, Evertz, Grass Valley, Imagine Communications, Mission, Slalom, Sony Media Cloud Services, TrackIt, Teradici, and Wizeline.

“The growth of the cloud changed how movies are made, how live news and sports are produced and distributed, and how we watch video today,” said Matt Garman, Senior Vice President, AWS Sales & Marketing. “And yet, we are still in the early stages of cloud transformation for media and entertainment. Customers continue to accelerate reinvention in areas like media supply chain, live streaming, and broadcasting. With Amazon Nimble Studio, creative studios can run low-latency virtual workstations and rendering to produce content faster and collaborate remotely without worrying about underlying infrastructure. And, with the launch of AWS for Media & Entertainment, customers can accelerate this transformation with a greater focus on solutions for their highest priority workloads.”

“The support of Dolby technologies on AWS is a critical component of how we meet the needs of our partners who are looking for flexible and scalable solutions to deliver their content,” said Jean-Christophe Morizur, Senior Director of Pro Products & Solutions for Dolby. “With more people than ever craving Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos experiences, especially within the streaming and live entertainment sectors, AWS helps our partners quickly and efficiently meet this demand.”

Let’s take a look at how this initiative aligns services, solutions, and partners according to key solution areas that address high-priority customer use cases in media and entertainment.

AWS Solution Areas for M&E customers

AWS for Media & Entertainment helps customers select and deploy the right services and solutions with a portfolio of purpose-built AWS and Partner capabilities aligned against five industry solution areas:

Content Production

AWS enables creative studios to spend less time rendering and more time collaborating using the most comprehensive set of cloud capabilities for content production. In addition to Nimble Studio, AWS supports massive rendering and virtual workstation workloads running industry standard applications from Autodesk, Adobe, and Blackmagic Design using unmatched compute capabilities such as Amazon EC2 G4dn instances with a high performance remote display protocol such as NICE DCV. For customers who prefer bespoke solutions, AWS has tutorials and guides to build a cloud-native creative studio with solutions such as AWS Studio in the Cloud. Customers can launch video editing and graphics-intensive virtual workstations in more locations with the most extensive global footprint of any cloud provider. More than 40 AWS Partners offer purpose-built solutions for Content Production on AWS, including Autodesk, Epic Games, and Teradici. Learn more at https://aws.amazon.com/media/content-production/

“Now more than three years into our cloud journey, we’ve seen how integral rendering on AWS is to our render farm strategy,” said Jon Stanley, Head of Systems at Method Studios in Melbourne. “We’ve shifted focus away from capex purchases or hiring equipment, and are now focused on the cloud. At this point, we’ve automated most AWS infrastructure management and are spending far less time racking servers, managing firmware updates and replacing broken hardware. Our goal is to keep reducing the time it takes to get a finished frame back to artists, so that we can keep raising the bar in terms of quality and turnaround time for clients.”

Media Supply Chain & Archive

AWS offers Technology and Engineering Emmy® Award-winning, purpose-built capabilities to help customers centralize content storage, processing, creation, and distribution operations from the ground to the cloud—resulting in cost optimization, resource reduction, and collaboration. The AWS Content Analysis solution lets customers reduce human involvement needed to catalog video archives and generate metadata by combining the video transcribing capabilities of AWS Elemental MediaConvert with Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Translate, and Amazon Comprehend. Using Media2Cloud, customers can migrate video assets and associated metadata to the cloud with a ready-made solution for a serverless, end-to-end ingest workflow leveraging MediaConvert, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon CloudFront, and a range of AWS Machine Learning services. Customers such as Turner Broadcasting System use AWS to secure decades-old media archives by deploying Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which is designed for 99.999999999% durability (11 9’s) and industry-leading performance, scalability, and availability. More than 80 AWS Partners provide dedicated solutions for Media Supply Chain & Archive applications on AWS, including Dalet, SDVI, and Telestream. Learn more at https://aws.amazon.com/media/supply-chain-archive/

“AWS is the most mature offering available,” says Igor Brezac, Chief Systems Architect, Digital Media at Discovery. “The pricing is excellent. We are also attracted by the ability to get new instances up and running at a moment’s notice. With AWS, it is easier to focus on business initiatives without having to manage hardware and infrastructure.”

Broadcast

AWS is the leading choice for broadcasters, with over 1,600 channels worldwide originating from the AWS Cloud. Customers including FOX, ViacomCBS, and Discovery pioneer the future of video delivery using an unmatched portfolio of purpose-built AWS services and appliances, along with partner solutions, to run low-latency broadcast workloads with greater agility, elasticity, scalability, and reliability than anywhere else. By using AWS Elemental MediaConnect, a high-quality transport service for live video, and AWS Elemental Live software and hardware for encoding live outputs, customers can position on-premises workloads where they are needed, building broadcast workflows on AWS for live events and 24/7 channels. Content owners also use MediaConnect as a hub to easily share, syndicate, and distribute content from the AWS Cloud. With Statistical Multiplexing (Statmux) for AWS Elemental MediaLive, customers can deliver linear content more flexibly and efficiently, extract more bandwidth capacity from networks, ensure reliable 24/7 operations, and reduce total cost of ownership for linear video delivery. More than 35 AWS Partners for Broadcast technologies, including Evertz, Grass Valley, and Imagine Communications, are available for customers to choose from. Learn more at https://aws.amazon.com/media/broadcast/

“Working with AWS, we’ve reinvented how we produce and distribute content to our consumers across all platforms and devices using the cloud,” said Paul Cheesbrough, Chief Technology Officer and President of Digital, Fox Corporation. “We’ve transformed our existing operation, but more importantly we’ve laid the tracks for the future in a way that will help us innovate and adapt for many years to come. Our extended partnership with AWS will strategically underpin our video and data workflows with a world class, adaptable, reliable, and scalable set of platforms that will extend and evolve to power our business well into the future.”

Direct-to-consumer (D2C) & Streaming

AWS offers the most purpose-built services for D2C & streaming, helping leaders like Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, Discovery+, HULU, and Prime Video reliably deliver, monetize, and support live and on-demand media over the internet, and bring unparalleled experiences to screens everywhere. AWS has more than 15 years of media & entertainment experience, with AWS Elemental continuing to lead the industry with services such as AWS Elemental MediaLive, a broadcast-grade live video processing service, and AWS Elemental MediaConvert, a file-based video transcoding service with broadcast-grade features. Customers can deploy cost-effective live streaming channels using the Live Streaming on AWS solution built with MediaLive, or deliver on-demand video workloads with the Video on Demand on AWS solution built around MediaConvert to cost-effectively process and deliver video-on-demand (VOD) content to global audiences. Optimized for media & entertainment workloads, the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN) lets customers deliver massive video-on-demand catalogs or live stream content to millions of viewers through 216+ points of presence and a global network backbone. More than 60 AWS Partners offer solutions to support D2C & Streaming workloads, including Evergent, Brightcove, and Irdeto. Learn more at https://aws.amazon.com/media/direct-to-consumer-d2c-streaming/

“It’s strategically important for us to keep reliability and security at the forefront of our service architecture,” says Patrick Miceli, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology officer at Peacock. “As a result of our multi-region, distributed approach and the help of AWS, we were able to achieve Peacock’s technology goals rapidly and at scale.”

“When we envisioned the technology foundation for HBO Max, AWS was the clear choice based on depth and breadth of technology and proven success as the core streaming infrastructure for HBO GO and HBO NOW,” said Jason Lenhart, Vice President Engineering & Operations, Direct-to-Consumer Technology at WarnerMedia. “AWS services, solutions, and support played a key role in the flawless launch of HBO Max and provide a trusted platform as we continue to innovate our service and scale our footprint internationally.”

Data Science & Analytics

Customers including the National Football League, Bundesliga, and FORMULA 1 use AWS tools to build dynamic audience experiences and create new ways to measure and visualize world-class competitions. Media and entertainment companies can ingest and analyze billions of audience events per day with the best cost-performance of any cloud using Amazon EMR, and choose from unmatched machine learning capabilities to segment audiences, forecast inventory, perform contextual analysis, and create personalized experiences and recommendations. Customers drive innovation in analytics by choosing from 15+ purpose-built AWS database engines—more than any other cloud provider—to match media & entertainment analytics use-cases such as audience analysis, customer 360, advertising analytics, contextual analysis, and identity enrichment. And, with 12 Artificial Intelligence (AI) services, AWS customers can use the power of ready-made intelligence for their applications and workflows, such as easily adding image and video analysis to applications using proven, highly scalable, deep learning technology with Amazon Rekognition, or automatically converting audio and video assets into fully searchable archives for highlight generation, compliance monitoring, content consumption analysis, and monetization with Amazon Transcribe. Customers can also choose from more than 30 AWS Partners including EPAM, GrayMeta, and Veritone, with offerings specific to media & entertainment analytics workloads. Learn more at https://aws.amazon.com/media/data-science-analytics/

“We needed a technology provider that would help us innovate faster and push our organization into the future, and AWS was a clear choice to partner with,” said Ross Brawn, Managing Director of Motor Sports, FORMULA 1. “By tapping into the breadth and depth of AWS and its innovative cloud technologies we’ve been able to bring fans closer to the split-second decisions on the track, redesign our future F1 cars, help us better understand the wealth of F1 data, and run analytics and machine learning to harness the power of that data, and so much more. We’re excited about what we’ve accomplished and thrilled to see what more we can do together.”

We’re excited to see this initiative help customers move faster across each of the solution areas. For more information about AWS for Media & Entertainment, visit https://aws.amazon.com/media/