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Amazon Interactive Video Service – Add Live Video to Your Apps and Websites

166 points by rengers 6y ago

reggieband 6y ago
Price is pretty good, surprisingly. Looks like they take RTMP in and output m3u8 (probably fmp4 behind the scenes). 2 second latency is also not bad. Larger streamers on Twitch can get ~20k concurrent viewers. A long streaming day would be 10 hours. They would also be streaming from NA so using their example pricing suggests: Input: $2/hour * 10 hours = $20 Output: $0.15 * 10 * 20,000 = $30k A worst case scenario of $30,020/day of streaming. Still seems financially unviable. I guess Twitch can stay in business for now. EDIT: Basic table Viewers Hours Min Best Worst 20000 10 $7,520 $14,020 $30,020 2000 6 $462 $852 $1,812 500 4 $83 $148 $308 200 2 $19 $32 $64
- borramakot 6y ago
  I've wondered for a while- are there heuristics on the income a steamer can make per viewer-hour? Edit: I'd googled this before, but apparently I found the right way to ask: this site says from 1c to $1/hour/viewer. https://wallethacks.com/how-much-do-twitch-streamers-make/#:~:text=The%20rate%20streamers%20get%20paid,headsets%20to%20chairs%20to%20keyboards https://wallethacks.com/how-much-do-twitch-streamers-make/#:....
  - cjhveal 6y ago
    For what it's worth, that's just income directly from sponsored content. The bulk of livable streaming income (outside of huge endorsements) comes from monthly subscriptions, so conversion rate matters as much as total viewership.
- joecot 6y ago
  > I guess Twitch can stay in business for now. I assume you're being sarcastic/coy, but for those that might not know, Amazon owns Twitch. I'm guessing this service is them white labeling Twitch's tech infrastructure, and priced such that someone could not make a Twitch competitor with reasonable profit margins.
  - freehunter 6y ago
    And they wonder why people complain about anti-trust.
    - oldmanhorton 6y ago
      Well, i don't think there are rules that they have to offer their proprietary tech at wholesale. I think it's a problem that Amazon is so massive as to own this tech at all, but once you have it, i would believe it's better to sell it for profit than to keep it locked up
- jontro 6y ago
  Weird that they just not charge for egress as with other services. Also it seems a lot cheaper, assuming full hd is 1 MB/s. That would mean approx 3.6GB/h which would come out at 0.54$/h in comparison to their 0.15$/h pricing
  - reggieband 6y ago
    > Weird that they just not charge for egress as with other services. My guess is they are charging ingress in place of some equivalent of compute necessary to transmux. That cost is fixed regardless of number of viewers. Their docs state "The maximum input for a Standard channel is 8.5 Mbps and 1080p resolution (full HD)." but they could be outputting something less than that.
    - jontro 6y ago
      The FAQ states the following "If you send the maximum 8.5Mbps, 1080p60 stream, Amazon IVS will create 8.5Mbps 1080p60, 3Mbps 720p60, 2Mbps 720p30, 1.2Mbps 480p30, 800Kbps 360p30, and 400Kbps 160p30 renditions in an ABR stream." I assume you will only be charged for full hd if the client is streaming it
- mabbo 6y ago
  Imagine you're a University that needs to, as quickly as possible, build a system to have streaming video for all your classes. Otherwise, you've got students and parents saying they want their money back because they paid for real classes, with Q&A and a live professor, and not pre-recorded videos. 200 viewers for 2 hours sound about right for a typical large University lecture. Typical students are paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars per lecture. $64 per class would put a dent into the University's budget, but not a huge one. And the fact that you can now scale a class to 1000 to 2000 students simultaneously, well that's cheaper than hiring more professors. In short, I don't think this is meant to compete with Twitch or Youtube. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a niche it can work within. (Bias note: I work for a totally unrelated branch of AWS. My thoughts and words are my own and are not representing my employer in any way.)
  - wrkronmiller 6y ago
    Interesting point. I'd be surprised if most universities were trying to build out apps for the current quarantine though. More likely they just email links to Zoom conferences or something to that effect, no?
    - asutekku 6y ago
      That’s how it is handled in most universities in finland as far as i know. Lectures are just zoom meetings and everyone already knows how to use it.
  - gundmc 6y ago
    My University had GSuite for all students and faculty. Meet supports up to 250 participants for a normal call and Livestream only for up to 100,000 viewers. I imagine Microsoft has a similar offering for schools that use their products. I don't see a case where it makes sense for schools to be rolling their own livestream platform and paying these fees. Edit: I'm not positive if the Livestream capabilities are included in the free Education package or just the enterprise package.
    - johnbatch 6y ago
- ponker 6y ago
  This isn’t for consumer streaming — those people will still use Twitch. This is for people building things like corporate meeting software for which the users will never be close to 20,000 concurrent and the costs of $30k don’t even get looked at.
  - hmmazoids 6y ago
    Yup agreed -- looking at it from the lens of building a streaming website that scales to that many viewers per stream, it isn't going to be cheap (but cool it can handle it if you put the money in I guess). I assume this is more targeted towards universities where they have a max of 300 students (at least that's what my university capped classes at) and they need something to get started quickly. At most they may stream for like 6 hours a day for each class. You don't even need good quality -- lowest tier quality (SD) ends up being $2.00 per hour * 6 = $12 $0.0375 per hour * 6 * 500 = $67.50 Honestly ~$80-100 per day to stream to all your students? Still kinda expensive I guess but might be a small price to pay for a university if it means they can offer streaming education. Not to mention 99% of the time students don't even tune in and just watch the VOD.
- mikeryan 6y ago
  Cloudflare does $1 per 1000 minutes viewed at that pricing they're only $12k. (plus storage - likely only a few bucks more)
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  I don't get how it can cost so much, and also how YouTube or Twitch would let you stream for free. They can't be making that much money off a stream, can they? A 10 hour stream viewed by 20,000 people... My recollection of YouTube is that they pay the creator approximately a dollar per thousand views, if that's a third of what they make, then they make 3 dollars per thousand views. Assume YouTube counts a view as ten minutes, so 200k hours of streaming would be 1,200,000 views (200k hours to minutes / 10) would be (120*3) 3,600 dollars? Something seems off by an order of magnitude. Is the markup that high? Did I make a calculating mistake?
  - jpalomaki 6y ago
    Price is likely set based more on how much customers are willing to pay for this service. The cost to provide the service can be much lower. Target market could be for example companies that provide live streams as streams as service (equipment, people, production etc)
  - goldenshale 6y ago
    Because most recordings are never actually streamed to that many people. My guess is that the popular and expensive streams make profit while the rest cost basically nothing to host.
  - reggieband 6y ago
    You can't compare it to how much it costs YouTube. You have to compare it to how much it would take to build yourself. Here is Fastly CDN pricing https://www.fastly.com/pricing https://www.fastly.com/pricing which is a good enough indication of the market value of data transfer costs. Note that CDNs charge in $/GB (big B byte) and video is usually considered in Mbps (small b bit). Consider that the most costly tier of Amazon service ($0.17/hour) is based on a 8.5 Mbps 1080p stream. You should be able to use that to calculate if the service is competitive to bulk data transfer. Quick math: 8.5 Mbps / 8 = 1.0625 MB/s * 60 * 60 = 3825 MB/h / 1024 = 3.73 GB/h * 0.08 $/GB = $0.30/hour So based on that math, not a bad deal. Of course, Amazon is assuming (rightly) that with adaptive bit rate most people won't be streaming 8.5 Mbps continuously. And since they own their own CDN (Cloudfront) they aren't paying $0.08/GB. In fact, anyone doing significant bandwidth would get a discount. This is all very hand-wavy math but it should give you some insight as to why there are so few competitors in the consumer video space. Video delivery is just plain expensive from a data transfer perspective.
- PaulRobinson 6y ago
  Until 5 years ago I was CTO of a company called Livestation where we handled live streaming of about 40 news broadcasters including Al Jazeera, BBC World, CNN International, etc. In my stint we dealt with the Egyptian and Turkish uprisings. The relevant diasporas were super keen to see what was going on in all those countries, and often the only places you could see them online was with us (we had raw feeds in a few places). There is no way we would have paid $752/hour for 20,000 users for 10 hours. We would have dropped the bit rate way, way down (which is fine for most content), and we'd agreed pretty decent bandwidth rates all round. Depending on context, 2 second latency might not be worth it either - spend less, get 10 second latency and use HLS using an off the shelf CDN, and you're going to pull the price down even further. When Akamai can offer you a better deal than this, you have to wonder how good a deal this is. :-) We did end up using RTMP a lot for a P2P live streaming product, but that never took off, and eventually the company folded. Fun times, though.
  - reggieband 6y ago
    > When Akamai can offer you a better deal than this, you have to wonder how good a deal this is. :-) If you were doing the volume of traffic necessary to get the Akamai discount in the range you are suggesting then you are also going to be able to negotiate Amazon pricing in a similar way. It is unfair to compare theoretical bulk CDN pricing to non-discounted Amazon pricing. It would be like negatively comparing the published price of some other CDN to your private knowledge of deals you did with Akamai that probably included contractual commitments. If you go by published CDN pricing (I use Fastly as an example in another post below) and assume you are pushing close to the maximum bitrate then the comparison is actually reasonably fair. Anything outside of that is speculation based on theoretical deals you might negotiate based on theoretical usages. However, I would have no problem agreeing that building your own system to handle large scale would probably get to a lower $/GB. But then you have to build it, maintain it, monitor it, etc.
    - PaulRobinson 6y ago
      My problem with Amazon at the time, was there was no mechanism to start that conversation. Most CDNs have account managers where you can have a call and discuss a TB/month commit, and price accordingly. I looked for ways to reach out to AWS to do the same, and no dice: they have the Hollywood principle in place, which means you'll get your account manager after you have already committed to them as a platform. I'm sure that I would have got a better deal if only I'd figured out how...
- atopuzov 6y ago
  Twitch is owned by Amazon.
pctf 6y ago
I wonder if this will help solve problems created by shelter in place. It seems like it would be easy to spin up a website to stream classes to students using this.
- techntoke 6y ago
  Did you see the costs? Might as well use YouTube.
woeirua 6y ago
The proliferation of half-baked services at AWS needs to end. There are way too many services that are just enticing enough to get you to play around with it, but then you realize it's totally crippled and unusable for most actual workflows, or that someone else already does it way better. They need to focus on a few that are commercially viable and let other companies prove out the rest.
- joecot 6y ago
  There are plenty of companies thoroughly locked in to AWS infrastructure. They don't need to lure in new companies with these services (though the wide variety helps). The point is to get companies already locked in to start using these services and lock themselves in more, so they have even more difficulty ever leaving.
- jcun4128 6y ago
  I saw they have this satellite ground station service, I wonder what that would actually allow you to do.
- ponker 6y ago
  A lot of people would rather use 20 mediocre products from one vendor than 20 fantastic products from different vendors. I’m like this with Target —- I don’t want to go to multiple stores so I limit my household items to things that Target sells.
- tanilama 6y ago
  I mean this also depends on pricing. If they are cheap, then there is a place for them to exist. But I agree, too much stuff under the AWS umbrella, and trivial ones like this, will impact the brand image.
- jgalt212 6y ago
  No kidding, when I met with an AWS salesperson, I joked that AWS had more services than there are nouns in the dictionary. He quickly rattled off the current grand total of services, but would not make an attempt at listing them all.
- deleted 6y ago
moralestapia 6y ago
>Firstly, the video is low latency, which means that the time between you broadcasting and the time the video shows up on your viewer’s screens can be as low as 2-3 seconds. Excuse my ignorance, and I'm sure 2 seconds is probably an engineering feat, but I'm genuinely curious. What is it that prevents latency to go as down as a few hundred ms (pretty much close to and IP round trip) ?
- mmcclure 6y ago
  This definitely isn't ignorance, it's a very, very common question. The TL;DR on it is: cost. The most cost-effective way of delivering video is using some form of HTTP streaming (like HLS or DASH). In a nutshell, the player downloads a manifest that tells it where to find chunks of video, which are downloaded and cached in normal, commodity CDNs. Everything is stateless and is scaled like any other form of HTTP download. To do all of this you end up needing to transcode the incoming stream. All along the way through this process introduces latency, and for reference 20 seconds is perfectly normal HLS latency, so credit where credit's due, this is really impressive. One of my colleagues wrote about the state of low latency last year[1], and considered < 4 seconds to be "ultra low latency"...that's really rare, particularly among platforms. You can get lower latency, of course, but typically that involves stateful connections. All of that cheap commodity stuff that comes with HTTP streaming above goes away, and scaling to a large number of viewers can get extremely costly (and operationally difficult). [1] https://mux.com/blog/the-low-latency-live-streaming-landscape-in-2019/ https://mux.com/blog/the-low-latency-live-streaming-landscap...
  - ponker 6y ago
    You mean all those Twitch streamers see their chats More than 4 seconds after the relevant video has elapsed? And can you explain what you mean by “stateful”? Thanks
    - mmcclure 6y ago
      > all those Twitch streamers see their chats More than 4 seconds after the relevant video has elapsed Yep! I think Twitch can sometimes be at 4 seconds or less for what it's worth, but yes, that delay is real. It's generally not really noticeable because the communication is totally async; the streamer is doing other stuff, finishing other thoughts, etc, then can get to messages as they see them. > can you explain what you mean by “stateful”? Sure! I was talking about what kind of connection is necessary to deliver the video. A lot of real-time video solutions require stateful connections to the client, which means that once the client connects, the connection is kept open, and video data is streamed via that connection. Common examples on the web are things like WebSockets and WebRTC, but it gets really expensive because you basically have to maintain a persistent connection with every single viewer and it makes it impossible (or extremely difficult) to do any kind of meaningful caching. Stateless connections on the other hand are most of your common HTTP requests. The client asks for a resource, and gets it back. No prior connection setup is required, servers, networks, whatever can change between each request and everything will merrily chug along, which makes it much easier to scale.
nameoda 6y ago
The audio at the top of the page, marked "Voiced by Amazon Polly" has so much dissonance - they've inserted fake sounds to seem as if the speaker is drawing breath, which sounds pretty realistic, but the actual enunciation of words is so robotic and fake-sounding :)
- bigtones 6y ago
  Yes, I immediately noticed that when I started listening too. You can hear him inhale at the start of a paragraph which is kind of freaky, because his voice is super-robotic. Amazon Polly is in the uncanny valley of text to speech now.
- djaychela 6y ago
  I spend HOURS editing breaths and other noises out of the VOs I do... and they put them in? Why on earth would you do that? The voice is the unconvincing part - if that was 100% realistic, then the breaths to try to convince the listener that it's real would not be needed!
interesting_att 6y ago
Does anyone know how this would compare to Twilio's programmatic video? Specific use case is for livestreaming within a mobile app.
- kwindla 6y ago
  It depends on what you mean by "live." Twilio video is WebRTC, so it's very low latency. (Much lower than IVS.) But Twilio scales only to 50 people watching at a time, and costs ~10x what IVS costs. On the other hand, IVS scales to an infinite audience. But IVS has 4+ seconds of latency. Which might not be live enough for your use case. With IVS, you'll also need some way of capturing the video, encoding it as RTMP, and sending it to AWS. Not terribly hard if you've done a fair amount of video work previously, but not trivial if you haven't. If IVS is roughly what you need, it's very much worth looking at Mux. Great APIs, great support, been around much longer, and there's excellent sample code for building stuff on mobile. If you do need interactive latency (<200ms), you might also want to check us out at Daily.co. We compete with Twilio programmable video, have been around roughly as long, scale to 200 people in a live session, and we can stream to Mux for infinitely scalable recording and IVS-style live distribution.
Terretta 6y ago
Sometimes it seems things change quickly online, sometimes not so quickly. It’s been about 20 years since we built “broadband activated merchandising” (aka “BAM”) for selling wrestling hats and t-shirts at scale to millions of viewers, contextually triggered along side WWE live event video streams: A system and method for enhancing electronic commerce and/or communicating information concerning products and/or services in connection with multimedia (e.g., video) transmission and delivery is provided. The system and method facilitate targeted marketing and/or merchandising in connection with video streams delivered to users across a computer network, e.g., the Internet and/or the World Wide Web, by synchronizing ancillary content with the video stream. The method/system may be used in a broad range of applications for live, taped live and on-demand video streams. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20020019978A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US20020019978A1/en In your 640 or 800 px wide browser window, beside the live stream (320x240 at 700 kbps, ahem!), you had a product pane showing contextual offers you could add to your cart, and then check out when the event was over. The stream metadata was fed by a producer watching the live action and using a e-commerce store event dashboard to choose what products to promote when. For comparison, from this AWS article: The team have added the ability to send timed metadata along with the video so that you can fire events in your application at crucial points in the live stream... you can build experiences that create a more valuable relationship with your viewers on your own websites and applications. For example, if you were live-streaming a product launch, you could synchronize additional product information to be displayed as new products appear in the video. You could even show a buy now button that allows viewers to purchase the exact product they are watching at that moment on the live-stream. Pretty cool to see this descendant!
- psds2 6y ago
  After you pointed this out I think I realized the target market - A tool to build a platform for the rising live stream direct sales model. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-viya-china-livestream-shopping/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-viya-china-livestrea...
gpmcadam 6y ago
TwitchAAS?
phenkdo 6y ago
How does this compare to mux.com?
- jon_dahl 6y ago
  Caveat: Mux founder. Mux supports both VOD and Live video (and seamless transition from Live to VOD); this service is only live streaming. We’re a crack team of video experts who work really closely with our customers. Better developer experience, documentation, and support. More feature-rich and powerful. 100% focused on building the best video products for developers, rather than being AWS service #213. In general, we don’t like to bad-mouth competitors and we have lots of friends in engineering at Twitch and AWS (hi folks!), so hopefully this won’t be taken the wrong way. Twitch has built a great platform and kudos to them for this service, and obviously AWS is the most successful software business in the world today. Online video is growing quickly and there is room for a lot of players to succeed.
  - swyx 6y ago
    this was a great answer!

166 points by rengers 6y ago

Price is pretty good, surprisingly. Looks like they take RTMP in and output m3u8 (probably fmp4 behind the scenes). 2 second latency is also not bad. Larger streamers on Twitch can get ~20k concurrent viewers. A long streaming day would be 10 hours. They would also be streaming from NA so using their example pricing suggests: Input: $2/hour * 10 hours = $20 Output: $0.15 * 10 * 20,000 = $30k A worst case scenario of $30,020/day of streaming. Still seems financially unviable. I guess Twitch can stay in business for now. EDIT: Basic table Viewers Hours Min Best Worst 20000 10 $7,520 $14,020 $30,020 2000 6 $462 $852 $1,812 500 4 $83 $148 $308 200 2 $19 $32 $64

borramakot 6y ago
I've wondered for a while- are there heuristics on the income a steamer can make per viewer-hour? Edit: I'd googled this before, but apparently I found the right way to ask: this site says from 1c to $1/hour/viewer. https://wallethacks.com/how-much-do-twitch-streamers-make/#:~:text=The%20rate%20streamers%20get%20paid,headsets%20to%20chairs%20to%20keyboards https://wallethacks.com/how-much-do-twitch-streamers-make/#:....
- cjhveal 6y ago
  For what it's worth, that's just income directly from sponsored content. The bulk of livable streaming income (outside of huge endorsements) comes from monthly subscriptions, so conversion rate matters as much as total viewership.
joecot 6y ago
> I guess Twitch can stay in business for now. I assume you're being sarcastic/coy, but for those that might not know, Amazon owns Twitch. I'm guessing this service is them white labeling Twitch's tech infrastructure, and priced such that someone could not make a Twitch competitor with reasonable profit margins.
- freehunter 6y ago
  And they wonder why people complain about anti-trust.
  - oldmanhorton 6y ago
    Well, i don't think there are rules that they have to offer their proprietary tech at wholesale. I think it's a problem that Amazon is so massive as to own this tech at all, but once you have it, i would believe it's better to sell it for profit than to keep it locked up
jontro 6y ago
Weird that they just not charge for egress as with other services. Also it seems a lot cheaper, assuming full hd is 1 MB/s. That would mean approx 3.6GB/h which would come out at 0.54$/h in comparison to their 0.15$/h pricing
- reggieband 6y ago
  > Weird that they just not charge for egress as with other services. My guess is they are charging ingress in place of some equivalent of compute necessary to transmux. That cost is fixed regardless of number of viewers. Their docs state "The maximum input for a Standard channel is 8.5 Mbps and 1080p resolution (full HD)." but they could be outputting something less than that.
  - jontro 6y ago
    The FAQ states the following "If you send the maximum 8.5Mbps, 1080p60 stream, Amazon IVS will create 8.5Mbps 1080p60, 3Mbps 720p60, 2Mbps 720p30, 1.2Mbps 480p30, 800Kbps 360p30, and 400Kbps 160p30 renditions in an ABR stream." I assume you will only be charged for full hd if the client is streaming it
mabbo 6y ago
Imagine you're a University that needs to, as quickly as possible, build a system to have streaming video for all your classes. Otherwise, you've got students and parents saying they want their money back because they paid for real classes, with Q&A and a live professor, and not pre-recorded videos. 200 viewers for 2 hours sound about right for a typical large University lecture. Typical students are paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars per lecture. $64 per class would put a dent into the University's budget, but not a huge one. And the fact that you can now scale a class to 1000 to 2000 students simultaneously, well that's cheaper than hiring more professors. In short, I don't think this is meant to compete with Twitch or Youtube. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a niche it can work within. (Bias note: I work for a totally unrelated branch of AWS. My thoughts and words are my own and are not representing my employer in any way.)
- wrkronmiller 6y ago
  Interesting point. I'd be surprised if most universities were trying to build out apps for the current quarantine though. More likely they just email links to Zoom conferences or something to that effect, no?
  - asutekku 6y ago
    That’s how it is handled in most universities in finland as far as i know. Lectures are just zoom meetings and everyone already knows how to use it.
- gundmc 6y ago
  My University had GSuite for all students and faculty. Meet supports up to 250 participants for a normal call and Livestream only for up to 100,000 viewers. I imagine Microsoft has a similar offering for schools that use their products. I don't see a case where it makes sense for schools to be rolling their own livestream platform and paying these fees. Edit: I'm not positive if the Livestream capabilities are included in the free Education package or just the enterprise package.
  - johnbatch 6y ago
ponker 6y ago
This isn’t for consumer streaming — those people will still use Twitch. This is for people building things like corporate meeting software for which the users will never be close to 20,000 concurrent and the costs of $30k don’t even get looked at.
- hmmazoids 6y ago
  Yup agreed -- looking at it from the lens of building a streaming website that scales to that many viewers per stream, it isn't going to be cheap (but cool it can handle it if you put the money in I guess). I assume this is more targeted towards universities where they have a max of 300 students (at least that's what my university capped classes at) and they need something to get started quickly. At most they may stream for like 6 hours a day for each class. You don't even need good quality -- lowest tier quality (SD) ends up being $2.00 per hour * 6 = $12 $0.0375 per hour * 6 * 500 = $67.50 Honestly ~$80-100 per day to stream to all your students? Still kinda expensive I guess but might be a small price to pay for a university if it means they can offer streaming education. Not to mention 99% of the time students don't even tune in and just watch the VOD.
mikeryan 6y ago
Cloudflare does $1 per 1000 minutes viewed at that pricing they're only $12k. (plus storage - likely only a few bucks more)
ALittleLight 6y ago
I don't get how it can cost so much, and also how YouTube or Twitch would let you stream for free. They can't be making that much money off a stream, can they? A 10 hour stream viewed by 20,000 people... My recollection of YouTube is that they pay the creator approximately a dollar per thousand views, if that's a third of what they make, then they make 3 dollars per thousand views. Assume YouTube counts a view as ten minutes, so 200k hours of streaming would be 1,200,000 views (200k hours to minutes / 10) would be (120*3) 3,600 dollars? Something seems off by an order of magnitude. Is the markup that high? Did I make a calculating mistake?
- jpalomaki 6y ago
  Price is likely set based more on how much customers are willing to pay for this service. The cost to provide the service can be much lower. Target market could be for example companies that provide live streams as streams as service (equipment, people, production etc)
- goldenshale 6y ago
  Because most recordings are never actually streamed to that many people. My guess is that the popular and expensive streams make profit while the rest cost basically nothing to host.
- reggieband 6y ago
  You can't compare it to how much it costs YouTube. You have to compare it to how much it would take to build yourself. Here is Fastly CDN pricing https://www.fastly.com/pricing https://www.fastly.com/pricing which is a good enough indication of the market value of data transfer costs. Note that CDNs charge in $/GB (big B byte) and video is usually considered in Mbps (small b bit). Consider that the most costly tier of Amazon service ($0.17/hour) is based on a 8.5 Mbps 1080p stream. You should be able to use that to calculate if the service is competitive to bulk data transfer. Quick math: 8.5 Mbps / 8 = 1.0625 MB/s * 60 * 60 = 3825 MB/h / 1024 = 3.73 GB/h * 0.08 $/GB = $0.30/hour So based on that math, not a bad deal. Of course, Amazon is assuming (rightly) that with adaptive bit rate most people won't be streaming 8.5 Mbps continuously. And since they own their own CDN (Cloudfront) they aren't paying $0.08/GB. In fact, anyone doing significant bandwidth would get a discount. This is all very hand-wavy math but it should give you some insight as to why there are so few competitors in the consumer video space. Video delivery is just plain expensive from a data transfer perspective.
PaulRobinson 6y ago
Until 5 years ago I was CTO of a company called Livestation where we handled live streaming of about 40 news broadcasters including Al Jazeera, BBC World, CNN International, etc. In my stint we dealt with the Egyptian and Turkish uprisings. The relevant diasporas were super keen to see what was going on in all those countries, and often the only places you could see them online was with us (we had raw feeds in a few places). There is no way we would have paid $752/hour for 20,000 users for 10 hours. We would have dropped the bit rate way, way down (which is fine for most content), and we'd agreed pretty decent bandwidth rates all round. Depending on context, 2 second latency might not be worth it either - spend less, get 10 second latency and use HLS using an off the shelf CDN, and you're going to pull the price down even further. When Akamai can offer you a better deal than this, you have to wonder how good a deal this is. :-) We did end up using RTMP a lot for a P2P live streaming product, but that never took off, and eventually the company folded. Fun times, though.
- reggieband 6y ago
  > When Akamai can offer you a better deal than this, you have to wonder how good a deal this is. :-) If you were doing the volume of traffic necessary to get the Akamai discount in the range you are suggesting then you are also going to be able to negotiate Amazon pricing in a similar way. It is unfair to compare theoretical bulk CDN pricing to non-discounted Amazon pricing. It would be like negatively comparing the published price of some other CDN to your private knowledge of deals you did with Akamai that probably included contractual commitments. If you go by published CDN pricing (I use Fastly as an example in another post below) and assume you are pushing close to the maximum bitrate then the comparison is actually reasonably fair. Anything outside of that is speculation based on theoretical deals you might negotiate based on theoretical usages. However, I would have no problem agreeing that building your own system to handle large scale would probably get to a lower $/GB. But then you have to build it, maintain it, monitor it, etc.
  - PaulRobinson 6y ago
    My problem with Amazon at the time, was there was no mechanism to start that conversation. Most CDNs have account managers where you can have a call and discuss a TB/month commit, and price accordingly. I looked for ways to reach out to AWS to do the same, and no dice: they have the Hollywood principle in place, which means you'll get your account manager after you have already committed to them as a platform. I'm sure that I would have got a better deal if only I'd figured out how...
atopuzov 6y ago
Twitch is owned by Amazon.

pctf 6y ago

I wonder if this will help solve problems created by shelter in place. It seems like it would be easy to spin up a website to stream classes to students using this.

techntoke 6y ago
Did you see the costs? Might as well use YouTube.

woeirua 6y ago

The proliferation of half-baked services at AWS needs to end. There are way too many services that are just enticing enough to get you to play around with it, but then you realize it's totally crippled and unusable for most actual workflows, or that someone else already does it way better. They need to focus on a few that are commercially viable and let other companies prove out the rest.

joecot 6y ago
There are plenty of companies thoroughly locked in to AWS infrastructure. They don't need to lure in new companies with these services (though the wide variety helps). The point is to get companies already locked in to start using these services and lock themselves in more, so they have even more difficulty ever leaving.
jcun4128 6y ago
I saw they have this satellite ground station service, I wonder what that would actually allow you to do.
ponker 6y ago
A lot of people would rather use 20 mediocre products from one vendor than 20 fantastic products from different vendors. I’m like this with Target —- I don’t want to go to multiple stores so I limit my household items to things that Target sells.
tanilama 6y ago
I mean this also depends on pricing. If they are cheap, then there is a place for them to exist. But I agree, too much stuff under the AWS umbrella, and trivial ones like this, will impact the brand image.
jgalt212 6y ago
No kidding, when I met with an AWS salesperson, I joked that AWS had more services than there are nouns in the dictionary. He quickly rattled off the current grand total of services, but would not make an attempt at listing them all.
deleted 6y ago

moralestapia 6y ago

>Firstly, the video is low latency, which means that the time between you broadcasting and the time the video shows up on your viewer’s screens can be as low as 2-3 seconds. Excuse my ignorance, and I'm sure 2 seconds is probably an engineering feat, but I'm genuinely curious. What is it that prevents latency to go as down as a few hundred ms (pretty much close to and IP round trip) ?

mmcclure 6y ago
This definitely isn't ignorance, it's a very, very common question. The TL;DR on it is: cost. The most cost-effective way of delivering video is using some form of HTTP streaming (like HLS or DASH). In a nutshell, the player downloads a manifest that tells it where to find chunks of video, which are downloaded and cached in normal, commodity CDNs. Everything is stateless and is scaled like any other form of HTTP download. To do all of this you end up needing to transcode the incoming stream. All along the way through this process introduces latency, and for reference 20 seconds is perfectly normal HLS latency, so credit where credit's due, this is really impressive. One of my colleagues wrote about the state of low latency last year[1], and considered < 4 seconds to be "ultra low latency"...that's really rare, particularly among platforms. You can get lower latency, of course, but typically that involves stateful connections. All of that cheap commodity stuff that comes with HTTP streaming above goes away, and scaling to a large number of viewers can get extremely costly (and operationally difficult). [1] https://mux.com/blog/the-low-latency-live-streaming-landscape-in-2019/ https://mux.com/blog/the-low-latency-live-streaming-landscap...
- ponker 6y ago
  You mean all those Twitch streamers see their chats More than 4 seconds after the relevant video has elapsed? And can you explain what you mean by “stateful”? Thanks
  - mmcclure 6y ago
    > all those Twitch streamers see their chats More than 4 seconds after the relevant video has elapsed Yep! I think Twitch can sometimes be at 4 seconds or less for what it's worth, but yes, that delay is real. It's generally not really noticeable because the communication is totally async; the streamer is doing other stuff, finishing other thoughts, etc, then can get to messages as they see them. > can you explain what you mean by “stateful”? Sure! I was talking about what kind of connection is necessary to deliver the video. A lot of real-time video solutions require stateful connections to the client, which means that once the client connects, the connection is kept open, and video data is streamed via that connection. Common examples on the web are things like WebSockets and WebRTC, but it gets really expensive because you basically have to maintain a persistent connection with every single viewer and it makes it impossible (or extremely difficult) to do any kind of meaningful caching. Stateless connections on the other hand are most of your common HTTP requests. The client asks for a resource, and gets it back. No prior connection setup is required, servers, networks, whatever can change between each request and everything will merrily chug along, which makes it much easier to scale.

nameoda 6y ago

The audio at the top of the page, marked "Voiced by Amazon Polly" has so much dissonance - they've inserted fake sounds to seem as if the speaker is drawing breath, which sounds pretty realistic, but the actual enunciation of words is so robotic and fake-sounding :)

bigtones 6y ago
Yes, I immediately noticed that when I started listening too. You can hear him inhale at the start of a paragraph which is kind of freaky, because his voice is super-robotic. Amazon Polly is in the uncanny valley of text to speech now.
djaychela 6y ago
I spend HOURS editing breaths and other noises out of the VOs I do... and they put them in? Why on earth would you do that? The voice is the unconvincing part - if that was 100% realistic, then the breaths to try to convince the listener that it's real would not be needed!

interesting_att 6y ago

Does anyone know how this would compare to Twilio's programmatic video? Specific use case is for livestreaming within a mobile app.

kwindla 6y ago
It depends on what you mean by "live." Twilio video is WebRTC, so it's very low latency. (Much lower than IVS.) But Twilio scales only to 50 people watching at a time, and costs ~10x what IVS costs. On the other hand, IVS scales to an infinite audience. But IVS has 4+ seconds of latency. Which might not be live enough for your use case. With IVS, you'll also need some way of capturing the video, encoding it as RTMP, and sending it to AWS. Not terribly hard if you've done a fair amount of video work previously, but not trivial if you haven't. If IVS is roughly what you need, it's very much worth looking at Mux. Great APIs, great support, been around much longer, and there's excellent sample code for building stuff on mobile. If you do need interactive latency (<200ms), you might also want to check us out at Daily.co. We compete with Twilio programmable video, have been around roughly as long, scale to 200 people in a live session, and we can stream to Mux for infinitely scalable recording and IVS-style live distribution.

Terretta 6y ago

Sometimes it seems things change quickly online, sometimes not so quickly. It’s been about 20 years since we built “broadband activated merchandising” (aka “BAM”) for selling wrestling hats and t-shirts at scale to millions of viewers, contextually triggered along side WWE live event video streams: A system and method for enhancing electronic commerce and/or communicating information concerning products and/or services in connection with multimedia (e.g., video) transmission and delivery is provided. The system and method facilitate targeted marketing and/or merchandising in connection with video streams delivered to users across a computer network, e.g., the Internet and/or the World Wide Web, by synchronizing ancillary content with the video stream. The method/system may be used in a broad range of applications for live, taped live and on-demand video streams. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20020019978A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US20020019978A1/en In your 640 or 800 px wide browser window, beside the live stream (320x240 at 700 kbps, ahem!), you had a product pane showing contextual offers you could add to your cart, and then check out when the event was over. The stream metadata was fed by a producer watching the live action and using a e-commerce store event dashboard to choose what products to promote when. For comparison, from this AWS article: The team have added the ability to send timed metadata along with the video so that you can fire events in your application at crucial points in the live stream... you can build experiences that create a more valuable relationship with your viewers on your own websites and applications. For example, if you were live-streaming a product launch, you could synchronize additional product information to be displayed as new products appear in the video. You could even show a buy now button that allows viewers to purchase the exact product they are watching at that moment on the live-stream. Pretty cool to see this descendant!

psds2 6y ago
After you pointed this out I think I realized the target market - A tool to build a platform for the rising live stream direct sales model. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-viya-china-livestream-shopping/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-viya-china-livestrea...

gpmcadam 6y ago

TwitchAAS?

phenkdo 6y ago

How does this compare to mux.com?

jon_dahl 6y ago
Caveat: Mux founder. Mux supports both VOD and Live video (and seamless transition from Live to VOD); this service is only live streaming. We’re a crack team of video experts who work really closely with our customers. Better developer experience, documentation, and support. More feature-rich and powerful. 100% focused on building the best video products for developers, rather than being AWS service #213. In general, we don’t like to bad-mouth competitors and we have lots of friends in engineering at Twitch and AWS (hi folks!), so hopefully this won’t be taken the wrong way. Twitch has built a great platform and kudos to them for this service, and obviously AWS is the most successful software business in the world today. Online video is growing quickly and there is room for a lot of players to succeed.
- swyx 6y ago
  this was a great answer!