Shoot the Bird

Linear Broadcast Distribution on AWS

Konstantin Wilms

Amazon Web Services

© 2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved©

So we had a few customer requests...

“We’re interested in examining alternatives to traditional

linear video distribution”

“Any solution will need to maintain

low latency high quality video”

“We shouldn’t have to sacrifice

performance or quality for cost savings”

And some of the reasons why?

“We’re out of capacity. We want to add more contribution

channels without impacting existing ones, utilize higher HD

bitrates across the board, ..”

Which started us down an interesting path...

Traditional multi-hop satellite distribution

First HopSecond Hop

Field Source / EncoderHeadend / ProcessingAffiliate Spoke / Decoder

“Broadcast distribution scales infinitely”

…but is not a pre-requisite for this use case

Can we implement a solution without affecting the

underlying media layers?

Can we architect for scale at low cost?

In a non-Cloud Solution …

Multiple datacenter footprints

High speed, costly IP transit

Local ops staff to manage infrastructure

A massive cap-ex outlay

Development staff to build this out

AWS takes care of this

undifferentiated heavy lifting

Edge Locations

Availability Zone

Region

Dallas (2)

St.Louis

Miami

JacksonvilleLos Angeles (2)

Seattle

Ashburn (3)

Newark

New York (3)

Dublin

London (2)

Amsterdam (2)

Stockholm

Frankfurt (2)Paris (2)

Singapore(2)

Hong Kong (2)

Tokyo (2)

Sao Paulo

South Bend

San JosePalo AltoHayward

OsakaMilan

Sydney

MadridSeoul

Mumbai

Chennai

Global Distribution Footprint

c

Massively Scalable Compute

Compute IntensiveIntel ES-2666 v3 (Haswell) optimized specifically for EC2

Memory IntensiveLowest price point per GiB of RAM

GPUs 1,536 CUDA cores

4GB of video memory

Enhanced NetworkingHigher PPS, Lower network jitter, low latency

IO IntensiveSSD Storage, EBS Optimized

High Storage24 x 2000 GiB per instance

AMI

EBS

Instance

Store

Amazon

EC2

Instance

Size instance by

Application need

Launch a CloudFormation stack

with all the infrastructure

resources for a specific

project

Autoscale the stack as

appropriate

Automated Infrastructure

AMI

CloudFormation

Deploy

Template

CloudFormation

Terminate

Template

AWS Ecosystem (License included in hourly* pricing)

INGEST STORE MANAGE SECUREPROCESS

CREATEMONETIZE

INTEGRATEDELIVER

So let’s take a closer look at the problem...

What if we evolved the second hop?

First HopSecond Hop

Field Source / EncoderHeadend / ProcessingAffiliate Spoke / Decoder

What if we Evolved the Second Hop?

Approach Up/downlink: dedicated and

internet-based IP links

Direct Connect For ‘uplink’

For stream consumption

Concerns FEC

~500ms + RTT latency

Second Hop

Headend / ProcessingAffiliate Spoke / Decoder

Direct Connect

Secure VPN

Route53

Looking at Bandwidth & Transport

Satellite $3-5000/Mhz/mo* (~$30k/20Mbits*) +

Spoke costs

Fixed b/w ceiling cap

AWS b/w to deliver an HD stream ~ $500/mo*

Pay as you go model

FEC Can be implemented on UDP layer

ARQ, SRT, LD for jitter/latency/reliability

Sub 1Gb Direct Connect (100Mbps)

Availability stream ingest (1:1, 1:N)

Second Hop

Headend / Processing

Affiliate Spoke / Decoder

$

$

$

! !

!

Multi-hop Distribution with AWS

First Hop

Field Source / EncoderHeadend / ProcessingAffiliate Spoke

Ingest

Fan Out

Egress

Scale Out

Multi-Region, Multi-AZ

Cellular

Internet

Direct Connect

Secure VPN

Internet

S3

Glacier

Route53

Multi-hop Distribution with AWS

Affiliate Spoke

Ingest

Fan Out

Egress

Multi-Region, Multi-AZ

Direct Connect

Secure VPN

S3

Glacier

Route53

Additional Workflows

Transient infrastructure

Templatize Environments

for Quick POCs

CloudBursting

(utilizing on-prem)

Additional Regions

Some notable features …

10GbpsNetwork placement

groups

Capacity plan for hundreds of live

HD streams and contribution silos

Low latency high throughput

Combine with regional replication

and Route53 for true nearest-

neighbor latency

Highly Scalable Infrastructure

c4g2m3

High Capacity Egress

GPU Transcode

IngestEncoder

Broadcast

Decode

Low Bitrate

Proxy

Fan out / fan in

Size workflow to compute

Flexible multi-format

HLS w/ Cloudfront CDN

MPEG-UDP w/FEC

Dedicated Pipe

Multi-Path Distribution

Amazon Glacier (Life Cycle Policies)

Amazon S3

Segment media into S3

Periodically archive to Glacier

Time-windowed hot content with infinite cold store

Store/Retrieve to local edit stations via high-speed partner appliances

Affiliates can make use of storage infrastructure (transcode)

Media Lifecycle Management

Let’s look at a real implementation…

Proof of Concept

Deployed in one afternoon into AWS VPC

Co-ordinated cross-country by a team of 3 – headend

operations, en/decoder manufacturer, and AWS

6Mbps 1080p60 MPEG-UDP w/FEC (SRT) stream

Distribution over public internet

200ms encoder to AWS, AWS to decoder latency

Lower measured latency than existing satellite 2nd hop

40 day ingress uptime with no video dropouts