NEW YORK—NBA fans should have better insight than ever into the subtleties of pro hoops beginning with the 2025-26 season, thanks to a new multiyear partnership between the league and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The partnership, announced today, makes AWS the Official Cloud and Cloud AI Partner of the league and its affiliate leagues, including the WNBA, NBA G League, Basketball Africa League and NBA Take-Two Media.

The NBA and AWS will launch NBA Inside the Game powered by AWS, a new basketball intelligence platform that will turn billions of data points into insights and interactive experiences, reimagining how fans engage with the game of basketball worldwide.

Built on AWS’s AI infrastructure, the platform will introduce a suite of features that enhance live broadcasts and elevate fan experiences across the NBA App, NBA.com and the league’s social media channels, the league said.

“Partnering with AWS provides us with an opportunity to elevate the live game experience through innovation and offer fans a deeper understanding of the game of basketball for years to come,” NBA Executive Vice President and Head of Media Operations and Technology Ken DeGennaro said. “AWS has a proven track record of delivering unique statistical insights and offering transformative experiences that will resonate with NBA fans around the world.”

The partnership pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in sports, AWS Vice President of Professional Services and Agentic AI Francessca Vasquez said.

“This partnership will showcase how cloud and AI can reimagine the game of basketball—from generating new insights to creating experiences that bring fans closer to the game they love,“ she said. ”Together, we’re delivering technology that not only enhances live broadcasts and digital platforms, but also transforms how players, coaches, and fans understand basketball.”

The NBA will leverage AWS’s AI capabilities to provide fans with live stats and comprehensive analytics during games. This new advanced statistics platform processes the NBA’s player tracking data, analyzing the movements of 29 data points per player using machine learning and AI to contextualize in-game developments and generate real-time insights. Fans can deepen their understanding of the game by accessing new statistics via the NBA App, NBA.com and during live NBA games, including during NBA on Prime broadcasts.

Throughout the 2025-26 season, the NBA and AWS will introduce new AI-powered stats that capture aspects of basketball performance that have not been measured previously, starting with:

• Defensive Box Score, which quantifies individual defensive contributions that traditional statistics cannot measure. AI algorithms detect which defender is responsible for each offensive player in real-time. Once the primary defender is determined, the traditional box score can now be enhanced by identifying the defender at the time each stat was recorded. Additional new metrics, such as ball pressure, double teams and defensive switches, can now be viewed and tallied as well. 
• Shot Difficulty, which transcends traditional make-or-miss statistics to evaluate every aspect of each shot attempt. The difficulty of attempted shots will be quantified with new stats, such as Expected Field Goal Percentage, which takes into account various factors like the shooter’s orientation and setup, defensive contest details related to pressure, interference and each player’s positioning on the court.
• Gravity, which shows what coaches and analysts have observed for years: how certain players create advantages for teammates simply by being on the court even without touching the ball. This new stat measures the level of attention a player receives from the defense, including how closely they’re guarded with or without the ball, to quantify the amount of space they create for their teammates. This system processes optical tracking data 60 times per second, using custom neural networks to analyze how defenders react to specific players, while factoring in real-time game context and historical data. 

NBA Inside the Game powered by AWS will also feature a called “Play Finder,” which uses AI to analyze and understand player movements across thousands of games. Using AWS services, such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, the feature will enable instant search and retrieval of similar plays, laying the foundation for future generative AI integrations built on player tracking data. Play Finder will help fans and broadcasters learn common offensive strategies and explore deeper insights by combining play results with advanced analytics.

A real-time alert system within Play Finder will enable commentators to provide instant historical context and strategic insights. NBA teams will have direct access to the ML models powering Play Finder to improve their front office and coaching workflows.

Future iterations of Play Finder will allow fans to explore basketball strategy on the NBA App.

The NBA App, NBA.com and NBA League Pass, the league’s out-of-market game package, will run on AWS. Through this partnership with AWS, the NBA will accelerate basketball’s growth worldwide by offering fans new and unique opportunities to understand team strategy and the concepts that lead to execution on the court. Additionally, the NBA and AWS will deliver in-language content and personalized experiences to fans across platforms.

More information is available on the AWS website.

With artificial intelligence one of the hottest topics in the media and entertainment industries, Amazon Web Services is highlighting a host of new solutions and tech partnerships designed to show attendees how AI and cloud-based solutions can have an immediate impact on the media and entertainment industries, particularly in sports.

“We are very excited about the NAB Show this year,” said Tracy Geist, global head of media & entertainment, games and sports marketing at Amazon Web Services (AWS). “When we heard that the show was going to have a big sports focus, we really leaned into that, because it fits in so well with many exciting things we have going on,” related to streamlining production, finding new ways to engage audiences, media convergence, monetizing content, data analytics and other areas, she said.

A lot of the AI discussion has focused on its future impact, and M&E is admittedly in the early stages of adoption compared to sectors like finance or health care. But much of AWS’s presence at the show is designed to be practical, with real-world demonstrations of how the technology can immediately begin to transform operations.

“I think we have reached the point where the industry is having positive conversations around generative AI, as something that supports and advances the industry right now,” Geist said. This marks a notable change from two years ago, she added, when there were widespread fears that AI would reduce the demand for creators. “It is an enabler, not a replacement,” she said.

Some examples of how the industry is embracing AI for sports can be found in several panels and sessions involving AWS executives and clients. In a particularly noticeable example, Warner Bros. Discovery Europe worked with AWS to recently launch the Cycling Central Intelligence Platform, which uses generative AI and other AWS solutions to provide real-time data insights to cycling commentators that will allow them to provide much deeper insights into the races. That case study will be among the topics covered on Tuesday, April 8 (10:30 a.m. in W224-W225), during the panel “Beyond Broadcast: The Rule of AI, Data Analytics and Personalization.”

In another sports-themed panel on Tuesday, AWS and IMAX executives will be discussing “Closer to the Action: How IMAX and AWS Are Elevating Live Sports Streaming” (1:15 p.m., W224-W225).

During the show, Amazon also announced a major agreement with TwelveLabs that will make its multimodal foundation models, Marengo and Pegasus, available soon in Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers developers access to models from AI companies through a single API. The deal is notable because AWS is the first cloud provider to offer models from TwelveLabs and because TwelveLab’s models are designed to make video more searchable.

Other demos are spread out over the Convention Center at the AWS booth, the NAB Show AI Innovation Pavilion in the West Hall, the AWS Theater and other locations.

One of AWS’s biggest sports-themed demos is an Esports Challenge, where four professional racing simulators in the lobby of the West Hall will allow attendees to experience the iconic Las Vegas Street circuit. Content from those simulators will be fed to a fully equipped production control room in the AWS booth, then used for a variety of different workflows, including the live race feed, data and analytics from the races and post-race interviews conducted by Amazon Nova, an AI model. The demo is designed to show how AI and cloud-based technologies can both streamline workflows and provide features that will better engage audiences, Geist said.

During the show, AWS will also offer hands-on demos of AI applications and the Amazon Nova foundation models for AI solutions (a first for NAB Show). It is also showcasing updates to Amazon Nova Reel for AI video production, augmented reality experiences and ATSC 3.0 broadcasts. Sinclair is using AWS for an ATSC 3.0 transmission of a 4K feed with Advanced HDR for broadcast to a local Las Vegas TV station, KSNV.

As part of those demos, visitors can use AWS’s generative AI to design a real-time racetrack, learn how to build and scale generative AI applications using Amazon Bedrock, and explore how the customizable generative AI-powered assistant Amazon Q can streamline their work.

The AWS Theater in the West Hall (W1343) will feature 26 sessions from partners and clients demonstrating deployments and applications. Featured participants include Arc XP, Avid, Beamr, Bitmovin, Coactive, Fabric, GeoComply, Hydrolix, IPV, LucidLink, LTIMindtree, Mediacube, the National Hockey League (NHL), New Relic, Orange Logic, Paramount Studios, Presidio, Quickplay, Sinclair, Synamedia, TwelveLabs, Virtusa, Wondery and more.

Additional demos involve radio, podcasting and innovative audio solutions. “This is actually the first time that we have had a story focused on audio and radio,” Geist said. Using AWS Partner Riverside.FM’s platform, AWS will record a live podcast. It will also operate an all-day automated radio broadcast with preprogrammed content. In addition, attendees will get a look at how AWS Elemental Media Services and Amazon CloudFront support podcast localization.

Copyright 2025 NAB

FRISCO, Texas—MediaKind is expanding its MK.IO Platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS), making it easy for media, sports and entertainment brands to launch high-quality streaming applications, the company said.

MK.IO Platform is now built to run on AWS’s global infrastructure, offering flexible deployment options and enabling content to deliver premium streaming experiences at scale.

MK.IO offers high-quality video experiences, monetization options and audience-engagement tools, enabling brands to deploy, scale, innovate and engage audiences globally within their preferred cloud ecosystem. The platform will be available on AWS Marketplace by the end of 2024.

“Our mission is to empower creators, developers and brands to redefine streaming for a global audience,” MediaKind CEO Allen Broome said. “Providing MK.IO Platform on AWS strengthens that mission by making MediaKind’s trusted solutions accessible to even more of the media community. Clients can now deliver groundbreaking content that drives fan loyalty, knowing their revenue streams are protected by a future-ready architecture.”

MK.IO Platform on AWS offers:

• Premium quality streaming, guaranteeing flawless video for live and on-demand content, ensuring uninterrupted experiences and unmatched performance during major global events.
• Advanced monetization tools that help brands maximize their fan base with dynamic ad placements, promotions, interactive banner ads and subscriptions, enabling hybrid monetization strategies.
• Integrated innovation ecosystem with MediaKind partnering with leading tech innovators to provide seamless access to the latest in app development, AI workflows and monetization tools.

Enhanced live sports contributions via MediaKind’s Beam, part of the MK.IO offering, offering real-time, programmable edge nodes for audience engagement.

MK.IO is the most recent step in MediaKind’s work with AWS. Through a pay-as-you-go model, customers can begin to use innovative media technology without the need for upfront integration costs. Seamless integration with AWS tools like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), along with built-in digital rights management (DRM) and security features, ensures an efficient, secure and high-quality viewing experience with the best video quality available, the company said.

For more information is available on the company’s website.

SEATTLE—In an effort to assist companies with the digital and streaming revolutions currently underway, Amazon has launched the AWS for Media & Entertainment feature designed specifically for broadcasters, content creators, producers, distributors and rights holders.

AWS for Media & Entertainment offers new and existing technology from AWS and AWS Partners tackling five key areas: content production; media supply chain and archive; broadcast; direct-to-consumer and streaming; and data science and analytics.

Among the technology offered with AWS for Media & Entertainment is the new Amazon Nimble Studio, a service designed to help set up creative studios at an accelerated rate. Other AWS services provided include AWS Elemental MediaPackage, AWS Elemental MediaConnect, AWS Elemental MediaLive, AWS Elemental MediaConvert, AWS Elemental MediaStore, AWS Elemental MediaTailor and Amazon Interactive Video Service.

AWS for Media & Entertainment has established dedicated AWS industry specialists and AWS Professional Services teams across each of its solution areas. It also identifies industry partners in each area, among which are AWS Partners Adobe, Dolby, Evertz, Grass Valley, Imagine Communications, Sony Media Cloud Services and Teradici.

Other companies now supporting AWS for Media & Entertainment made their own announcements regarding the news. For example, Accedo is providing support to accelerate experimentation of OTT video strategies with its Accedo Orchestra; Codemill will help simplify management of media production workflows with data science and analytics; and Veset will work to simplify the creation and management of linear channels in the cloud.

In addition, Vizrt has announced its support for AWS for Media & Entertainment, calling it a compliment to its Flexible Access Solution Suites. ThinkAnalytics and EditShare are also onboard in support of the new offering.

“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.”

For more information, visit Amazon’s website. 

SEATTLE—Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a new Channel Assembly feature for its AWS Elemental MediaTailor cloud-based personalization and monetization service. Channel Assembly allows broadcasters and OTT channel operators to create virtual live channels and optionally monetize the channels with dynamic server-side ad insertion.

With Channel Assembly, users sim assign a list of pre-prepared programs to a schedule. The service then delivers a playlist for a linear channel to audiences at scale, without having to re-transcode video content or create SCTE-35/104 infrastructure. Channel Assembly also uses content available in existing libraries, enabling content providers to craft specialist or niche live streaming services.

To build a virtual channel using Channel Assembly, users log into the AWS Management Console, configure a user profile with permissions to create AWS Elemental MediaTailor resources and assemble a live channel from HLS, DASH or CMAF packaged sources. The AWS Elemental MediaConvert file-based video encoding service can be used to transcode content from single file sources, including MP4, MOV and MXF formats, into the HLS, DASH or CMAF outputs.

AWS Elemental MediaPackage, Amazon Simple Storage Service or any compliant origin can be configured as the source location for content. Once a source location is defined, users can create programs and assemble a schedule for the linear channel. Programs can be scheduled in a loop with dynamic pre-, mid- and post-roll ad breaks defined.

For more information, visit AWS’s website. 

SEATTLE—The PGA Tour is adding Amazon Web Services (AWS) into its bag, choosing AWS to be its official cloud provider to help transform the way golf content is created, distributed and experienced for fans, Amazon said.

In addition to being the official cloud provider, AWS will also be the PGA Tour’s official artificial intelligence cloud provider, deep learning cloud provider and machine learning cloud provider.

The Tour will use AWS machine learning, storage, compute, analytics, database and media services to process and distribute video footage from each golf tournament. These will be used to create special PGA Tour features, including Every Shot Live, an OTT streaming platform powered by AWS that provides viewers live access to every shot from every player in a tournament.

AWS will also support TOURCast, a new version of the Tour leaderboard that gives fans “video game-like control” of how they watch a golf tournament, per Amazon. Fans will be able to change their viewing perspective with alternative camera angles, navigate around the course, view speed rounds and display player and shot stats on demand.

With AWS Media Services, the PGA Tour will be able to deliver video content faster for televised event coverage and OTT streaming, Amazon said. This process will have the Tour use AWS to simultaneously process and distribute OTT content, formatting it for reliable viewing over different delivery platforms and devices. AWS Media Services will also make tournament footage available to authenticated broadcasters, content subscribers from AWS and other sources.

Other AWS services that the PGA Tour will use includes the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for compiling past and future multimedia content, and Amazon Rekognition, which will automatically tag content with specific metadata.

“This transformational partnership with AWS will give our fans the opportunity to experience the PGA Tour like never before,” said PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan. “Growing and diversifying our fan base is a top priority for us, and thanks to the collaboration and innovation from AWS, we are creating more ways to experience the game of golf, while personalizing our content to enable fans to engage with the tournaments and players they support.”

In addition, as part of the deal AWS will become a trustee of First Tee, a youth development organization supported by the PGA Tour.

For more information, visit www.aws.amazon.com/sports.  

SEATTLE —Amazon Web Services is hitting the ice with the National Hockey League, as the two sides have come to an agreement that will see AWS become the official cloud, AI and machine learning infrastructure provider for the NHL.

AWS’ services are designed to help the NHL automate video processing and content delivery in the cloud, including leveraging its Puck and Player Tracking (PPT) system that is shared with media partners, teams and fans.

The NHL is also expected to build an enterprise video platform on AWS to aggregate video, data and related applications into one central repository to improve search and retrieval of archival footage, give broadcasters instant access to NHL content for syndication and licensing and facilitate the creation and delivery of new in-game analysis, predictions and video highlights for mobile, online and broadcast experiences. This new system will encode, process, store and transmit game footage from a series of new camera angles to provide continuous video feeds that capture plays and events outside the view of traditional broadcast cameras.

With Amazon Kinesis, which collects and analyzes video and data streams in real time, and machine learning services like Amazon SageMaker, the NHL will be able to audit its feeds to broadcast partners in real time. This will help create a smart monitoring system that detects and automatically fixes potential feed issues to ensure a seamless viewing experience across viewing platforms.

“AWS’s state-of-the-art technology and services will provide us with capabilities to deliver analytics and insights that highlight the speed and skill of our game to drive deeper fan engagement,” said NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman. “AWS is unmatched in the portfolio of cloud services that it delivers, including computer vision and machine learning, and we intend to leverage them across the board to provide advanced analysis to our teams, officials, and media partners faster than ever before. We’re thrilled to have AWS join the NHL’s family of blue-chip technology partners as we continue our focus on innovation and building the most advanced technology solutions in sports.”

The NHL will introduce its new AWS services and technology throughout the upcoming NHL season.

For more information, visit www.amazon.com/sports. 

LOS ANGELES—Integrated Media Technologies (IMT) announced it has received certification from Amazon Web Service (AWS) Partner to support Media2Cloud, a secure, serverless ingest framework.

Certification as an AWS systems integrator means media storage and processing customers can rely on IMT’s team of consultants to navigate cloud services and tap machine learning (ML) to create new value and gain new insights, IMT said.

It also means the company’s customers can use IMT’s SoDA software, which enables automated policy-based movement of on-premise content to AWS, providing them with greater efficiency in their overall asset management strategy, the company said.

With Media2Cloud, customers and AWS Partners like IMT can quickly establish a scalable workflow that supports video, images, audio files and documents. It allows customers to improve search and management of digital assets within deep archives through several AWS ML services for fast, accurate retrieval, it said.

The combination of IMT SoDA software and Media2Cloud will help users streamline and automate moving video assets and associated metadata to the cloud. Together, the solutions give users the ability to predict the cost and speed of data transfer to and from the cloud. With SoDA, media organizations can orchestrate storage from on-premise to the cloud and define storage policies based on data insights and cost, the company said.

“We are delighted to be recognized as an AWS Partner and certified systems integrator with support for Media2Cloud,” said Jason Kranitz, president, Systems Integration at IMT. “The collaboration with AWS allows us to create even more value for customers by empowering them to quickly and seamlessly extract key details from media files, making their media intelligence even smarter.”

More information is available on the company’s website.

SEATTLE—Amazon Web Services and ViacomCBS have announced a strategic partnership that will see AWS become the cloud provider for ViacomCBS’ global broadcast media operations. This deal will see the migration of ViacomCBS’ 425 linear TV channels and 40 global data and media centers to the AWS cloud.

ViacomCBS will use AWS cloud capabilities, including serverless, containers, databases, media services, analytics and machine learning, to build its cloud-based broadcast and media supply chain operating model. According to AWS, these services will allow the broadcaster to spin up new channels, dynamically assemble live content for delivery over any distribution channel, add image and video analytics to applications and automate workflows.

Specifically, the AWS setup will include AWS Elemental media services, as well as machine learning technologies Amazon Rekognition and Amazon SageMaker.

“We are expanding our strategic relationship with AWS to support our industry-leading technology and operations transformation,” said Phil Wiser, executive vice president and chief technology officer, ViacomCBS. “With AWS, we will automate and streamline our processes for content production, licensing and distribution to consumer streaming services and innovate faster to deliver improved customer experiences.”

AWS reached a similar deal recently with MGM. 

SEATTLE—Amazon Web Services has reached a multi-year deal with Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) that will power MGM’s media supply chain with AWS cloud technology to help distribute its TV and film content across multiple platforms.

The new MGM media supply chain will use AWS compute, serverless, storage, machine learning and media services. MGM will build a data lake on AWS using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to provide up-to-date content rights and ownership information and connect to a microservices architecture that will simplify and automate workflows and processes throughout the media supply chain.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert will be used by MGM to automate the processes for preparing and delivering MGM content, optimizing video for viewing on any screen, per AWS. The AWS Lambda serverless compute and AWS container services, meanwhile, will assist with the transfer, process and packaging of video for all media channels on demand. Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Glacier and Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive are set to provide MGM with secure content and data storage and archiving. 

There will also be the addition of Amazon Rekognition, a machine learning technology that can analyze content, as well as create and tag specific video frames with metadata.

MGM is also slated to use AWS analytics services like Amazon EMR and machine learning service Amazon SageMaker to predict content viewing and sales trends.

“Our new cloud-based media supply chain will give us increased visibility into owned content, the ability to better inform our sales teams and faster processing of licensing deal that will help us deliver more content experiences to viewers and grow new revenue opportunities,” said Doug Rousso, executive vice president and chief technology officer, MGM.

For more information, visit aws.amazon.com.  

As one of the architects behind Amazon’s cloud services, Vogels drives technological innovation at scale. Following a stint in the Royal Netherlands Navy in his youth, Vogels went into cancer research and soon realized “it wasn’t the field for me.” He shifted to computing research, focused on large-scale distributed computing (and is now deemed one of the world’s top experts on ultrascalable systems). 

Vogels has seen many industries, including media and entertainment, leverage cloud agility to roll out new applications and innovate faster. “The original M&E processes and workflows were developed in a time where you didn’t have modern cloud capabilities and everything existed onsite,” he said. “So collaborating with another studio often meant literally shipping hard drives back and forth. But, we’ve started to see this model flip on its head.” He says AWS now helps M&E customers with “everything from broadcast and film production workflows, to visual effects and rendering, to live and on-demand streaming” and that customers use AWS “to collaborate in ways they couldn’t before.”

Vogels described many use cases where M&E companies are using AWS, highlighting how Hulu uses AWS to support more than 50 channels for its Live TV offering; how Netflix uses more than 100,000 server instances on AWS, and how Amazon Prime uses AWS for seamless targeted advertising. Other clients include CBS Interactive (CBSi), which employs the cloud to support major events such as March Madness and the Super Bowl at speed and scale, and film franchises like “Avatar” and the “Lord of the Rings” film franchises, which use visual effects from Weta powered by AWS. Vogels emphasized that customers are at the heart Amazon’s innovation. A recent example of that is the 2019 Tech Emmy Award-winning work that Discovery and Fox NE&O (of Walt Disney Television) undertook to shift their media supply chains to the cloud with AWS and partners at SDVI Corp. and Evertz Technologies. 

Werner expects that with changing dynamics and economic demands, media companies will continue to move their businesses to the cloud “to make their video infrastructures more automated and scalable so that they can put all their energy into innovating new services.” The cloud will enable “high-quality viewing experiences with low latency and no buffering,” Vogel noted. He also foresees the growing use of machine learning for highlight creation, video clipping, live subtitling, metadata extraction and interactive features such as polling and live chat to engage more deeply with viewers.

TEL AVIV, Israel—TAG Video Systems has been awarded Amazon Web Services (AWS) Select Technology Partner status. To achieve this status, companies must meet strict technical and business criteria, TAG Video said.

By becoming an AWS Select Technology Partner, the company has established a relationship that will assist its customers cut a clear and simplified path toward an IP-based workflow in the cloud, said Kevin Joyce, TAG Zer0 Friction Officer. Coupling AWS with TAG’s Zer0 Friction on-demand OPEX operating model removes barriers to deploying broadcast operations in the cloud, the company said.

“The industry has been moving towards IP, the cloud and an OPEX model for some time, but the recent and sudden shift to remote operations has accelerated the process dramatically,” said Joyce.

“We’re delighted that our relationship with AWS will allow us to deliver the technology that will help our customers transition easily and quickly to more efficient and agile infrastructures,” he said. “Being an AWS Select Technology Partner also adds value to our Zer0 Friction approach, our strategy that allows customers the operational agility to manage software across applications and locations, maximizing asset utilization.”

Achieving the partner status also enables TAG Video to access the AWS Sandbox testing environment that streamlines the proof-of-concept (POC) process, the company said.

The sandbox allows customers using it to set up a monitoring workflow of different and interchangeable elements on a trial basis to see how well they work together. The sandbox makes it possible to experiment with cloud instances without commitment, evaluate infrastructure compatibility and test TAG’s performance in terms of monitoring and manipulating sources in the cloud, the company said.

More information is available on the company’s website.

LONDON—Video software provider Synamedia has announced that it is collaborating with Amazon Web Services in an effort to accelerate the adoption of cloud TV service worldwide.

Already, Synamedia’s Infinite cloud TV platform is being used by AWS’ Astro in Malaysia and E-Vision, a subsidiary of Etisalat Group, which operates a multicountry, multitenant OTT service.

Infinite is designed to allow video service providers to process, secure, distribute and monetize premium video across all devices, Synamedia says. The platform uses machine learning and AI to deliver a personalized TV experience.

Astro is utilizing Infinite to enhance its service to deliver premium video experiences to its subscribers across all devices. Subscribers can upgrade to new hybrid DTH and IP-enabled 4K UHD set-top boxes with a new UX and Synamedia Cloud DVR.

With E-Vision, the AWS platform currently live in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Infinite provides operators with a state-of-the-art platform to launch and run multiscreen OTT services.

Synamedia and AWS have also announced that they will host a webinar on June 10 at 10 a.m. ET titled “How to Build the New Pay-TV Bundle.” Registration is available online.

For more information, visit www.synamedia.com.  

SEATTLE—Amazon Web Services has debuted its new AWS Elemental Link device, which connects live video sources to AWS Elemental MediaLive for a simplified streaming process.

When AWS Elemental Link is connected to a video source, it sends all video, audio and metadata streams that arrive on the built-in 3G-SDI or HDMI connectors to AWS Elemental MediaLive. It features automatic, hands-free tuning that adapts to available bandwidth, per AWS. When the video is in the cloud, users can process, store, distribute and monetize it through AWS Elemental Media Services. Any number of Link devices can be monitored from the console, the company says.

The AWS Elemental Link is compact (32 cubic inches) and weighs less than a pound. It arrives preconfigured and can operate as soon as it is connected to power, video and internet, according to AWS.

AWS is now offering the Elemental Link for $995.

For more information, visit aws.amazon.com. 

Statistical Multiplexing (Statmux) is now available with AWS Elemental MediaLive, Statmux is a technology used in live broadcast workflows that allocates bits in real time among multiple live video channels. It instantaneously adjusts the bitrate of each channel in the statmux pool to make the best use of total available bandwidth and combines the encoded outputs into a single transport stream. This maximizes network efficiency by optimizing picture quality for a group of channels within a fixed total bandwidth.

Using AWS Elemental MediaLive with Statmux, customers can now deploy linear video processing and playout in the AWS Cloud for broadcast, cable, or terrestrial distribution.

Media companies, such as national broadcasters, originate live content and simultaneously share that content with their distribution partners. Traditionally, this has been accomplished by preparing channels for distribution using purpose-built, on-premises hardware encoders. These systems can take months to procure and configure, require extensive engineering to operate reliably, and cannot be repurposed once deployed. AWS Elemental MediaLive with Statmux lets broadcasters and content providers build and manage broadcast video workflows on fully managed AWS services and gain flexibility, reduce hardware and management costs, and deliver excellent picture quality with built-in reliability.

Key benefits of AWS Elemental MediaLive with Statmux include:

• Cloud flexibility—Add, remove, or update live channels based on evolving audience and business needs, easily introduce new codecs, prioritize resources on a per-channel basis, and take advantage of multiple codecs and resolutions.

• Built-in resiliency—Resources are automatically allocated across multiple availability zones for high availability and fully managed failover.

• High video quality—Statmux for MediaLive lets you maximize video quality while optimizing for fixed satellite or cable distribution bandwidth. And, you can tune quality settings on a per-channel basis without disruption to assure that the highest-priority channels maintain the highest quality.

• Operational efficiency—Build broadcast distribution workloads in minutes, without on-premises hardware, and deliver channels more efficiently over fixed network bandwidth.

• Monitoring and metrics—Integrated Amazon CloudWatch monitoring enables real-time views of video metrics and multiplexer performance.

• Unified headend—For content providers that distribute traditional broadcast video as well as multiscreen linear video, Statmux for MediaLive can deliver both through a single architecture. With the increasing importance of OTT delivery, having one system to manage all encoding can dramatically simplify operations.

Learn more about how customers are saving time, reducing overhead, maximizing low-cost cloud resources, and maintaining optimized picture quality with AWS Elemental MediaLive and Statmux here: https://aws.amazon.com/medialive/features/statmux.

SYDNEY – Tuesday 19 November, 2019 – Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced that Network 10, one of Australia’s largest television networks, has selected AWS Media Services to support its video transport structure for remote production in South Africa for its upcoming season of the reality TV series I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here, and to enhance the streaming delivery for live-streamed sports and Network 10 shows, including The Bachelor, Australian Survivor, and MasterChef Australia.

Network 10 is one of the first companies in Australia to use AWS Elemental MediaConnect, a cloud video transfer service, which provides secure and reliable delivery of live video content. The technology enabled Network 10 to transport video from Kruger National Park in South Africa to its Sydney-based production studio for I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here during the 2019 season, and will be used again in the upcoming seventh season.

Using a combination of AWS Elemental MediaConnect and AWS Advanced APN Technology Partner, Aspera’s High Speed Transfer Service, Network 10 reduced its production turn around window from overnight to less than two hours, and in some cases, only a few minutes.

This collaboration complements existing AWS Media Services used by Network 10, including AWS Elemental MediaLive and AWS Elemental MediaConvert. AWS Elemental MediaLive provides Network 10 with a streaming tool that encodes live video for play on any device, from broadcast television to internet-connected devices, such as smart phones and connected TVs. With AWS Elemental MediaConvert, Network 10 can process video files and clips to prepare on-demand content for distribution or archiving.

Network 10 has worked with AWS since 2015 and uses a suite of AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and Amazon ElastiCache to store and process on demand and archival footage.

Jason Tuendemann, Chief Information and Technology Officer at Network 10, said, “Network 10 has been delivering high-quality content to the Australian public for more than 50 years, with a constant lookout for tools that allow us to innovate and improve our offering for our viewers. By working with AWS, we have been able to speed up this process and deliver more content, and more importantly, richer content for production and advertisers. We are excited to be one of the first customers to use AWS Elemental MediaConnect in the Australian market, and to continue innovating with AWS tools and services.”

Adam Beavis, Commercial Director for AWS in Australia and New Zealand, said, “The Australian broadcasting industry is undergoing an incredible transformation using digital technology. Network 10 were charged with delivering a high-quality stream of live video content at a low cost – a task that AWS Elemental MediaConnect has made a reality. AWS is thrilled to continue to work with Network 10 to ensure it remains at the forefront of innovation.”

About Amazon Web Services

For 13 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 165 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 69 Availability Zones (AZs) within 22 geographic regions, with announced plans for 13 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Italy, South Africa, and Spain. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

November 15, 2019, UK, London:Arqiva, the international satellite and media services provider, has been selected by the international television company A+E Networks EMEA to provide on-demand content for the channel’s Amazon Prime on demand service in Germany and UK.

A+E Networks® EMEA, has been an Arqiva customer for over a decade, with the existing partnership spanning playout and connectivity across Africa and the Middle East, UK DTH satellite capacity and on-premise VoD processing services across EMEA (including the UK). As part of the new contract, Arqiva will manage the content processing, packaging and delivery of A+E Networks EMEA existing archive content in both UK and Germany, from where it is currently stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Simple Storage Service Glacier, to Amazon Prime.

One of A+E Networks EMEA’s key requirements was for the solution to be able to process all VoD requests as close to the cloud-based archive as possible in order to minimise content movement and therefore avoid costly cloud egress into on-premise data centres. Based on its latest hybrid on-premise/cloud offering, the solution implemented by Arqiva is the first to feature a completely cloud-contained journey, where content is taken from the online archive, processed packaged and delivered to Amazon Prime. This not only ensures significant cost-savings but transcoding in the cloud using AWS Elemental MediaConvert also enables Arqiva to process more simultaneous jobs at a far quicker pace.

Another primary factor in A+E Network EMEA’s decision to select Arqiva’s fully managed solution was its ability to integrate the company’s existing Identity and Access Management resources, ensuring the security of the platform whilst allowing A+E to retain full control of its content access and operation capabilities.

Matt Westrup, VP Technology and Operations at A+E Networks EMEA, said:“In a very dynamic and competitive media environment the ability to quickly and seamlessly deliver an even broader range of A+E Networks EMEA’s premium content to our Amazon Prime audience is a real strategic advantage. A solution like this means we can effortlessly build on our broadcast heritage in a viable way.”

Alex Pannell, Commercial Director Video Channels at Arqiva, said:“This deal marks a really important milestone for Arqiva. A+E Networks Germany is the first customer to use our new cloud VoD solution and its feedback on both the platform and onboarding process has been fantastic. We’ve been working really hard to extend our broadcast products onto cloud infrastructure and have built up an extensive set of skills and experience building on AWS. We see the fact that a major multi-channel broadcaster has adopted the cloud for its content archive as clear proof this was the right strategy to pursue for the future.”

About Arqiva

Arqiva is a leading UK communications infrastructure and media services provider dedicated to connecting people wherever they are through the delivery of TV, radio, mobile and machine to machine communications.

We are an independent provider of telecom towers, with circa 8,000 active sites across Great Britain, and are also the only supplier of national terrestrial television and radio broadcasting services in the UK. Our advanced networks support the exponential growth of connected devices and the ever-increasing demand for data from smartphones to tablets, connected TVs to smart meters.

Customers include major UK and international broadcasters such as the BBC, ITV, Sky Plc., Turner Broadcasting, the independent radio groups, major telco providers – including the UK's four mobile network operators – and energy and water companies.

For more information, news and insights from Arqiva, please visit the website at: www.arqiva.com

About A+E Networks EMEA

A+E Networks EMEA is a leading global media network reaching 74m homes in more than 100 countries across UK, Europe, Africa and Middle East. Our portfolio of popular, high performing and creative brands - HISTORY®, Crime+Investigation®, Lifetime®, HISTORY2®, UK free to air BLAZE®, COSMO in Spain and dedicated VOD brands on key platforms HISTORY Play and Crime+Investigation Play - have entertained and inspired audiences for over 20 years; telling the stories that need to be told. We complement our award-winning factual and entertainment local commissions and global hit factual and drama series with innovative talent-led exclusive digital content and top-rated podcasts. We partner with 366 major operators broadcasting throughout UK, Africa, CEE, German Speaking Markets, Iberia and Italy. With offices in London, Johannesburg, Warsaw, Madrid, Munich and Rome.

From content creation to distribution and everything in between, content creators of all sizes require media and entertainment workflows that put top notch media in the hands of consumers.

AWS solutions enable customers to build faster, smarter, and more agile workflows across the entire value chain—reducing constraints, increasing efficiency, and creating opportunities to delight viewers and drive new revenue— across all types of media, including audio, video, text, and images.

Download the eBook, Innovate Quickly, to discover how you can:

• Eliminate traditional capacity and geographic constraints
• Realize the benefits and efficiency of production workflows in VFX, editing, rendering, and asset storage
• Scale storage up and down to better integrate analytics for viewer content personalization
• Enhance broadcast, OTT and D2C and digital publishing distribution
• Experience the value of AWS services – you can watch real-world video case studies from companies such as National Geographic, Untold Studios, Mikros Animation, Universal Music Group, and more

Download Now!

With your OTT video workflow in the cloud, content will be your top priority – and you need neither cloud nor broadcast engineering expertise to make it happen. This eBook explains how you can add cloud-based OTT video workflows to your repertoire.

Topics include:

• The challenges of building end-to-end OTT video workflows (explosive OTT growth, abundant viewer choices + changing viewing habits, increased complexity, and more)
• The key solutions that take the guesswork out of processing, managing, and delivering video to viewers
• The four pillars of an economical and profitable OTT video plan – flexibility, agility, intelligence, and global scale – and why they are non-negotiable
• The best-tested ways to support OTT video workflows + real-world customer use cases

Click Here to Download the ebook.

SEATTLE—June 4, 2019—Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) has chosen AWS as its standard for cloud-based machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads. NASCAR will use the breadth and depth of AWS technologies to build cloud-based services and automate processes, including a new video series on NASCAR.com called This Moment in NASCAR History powered by AWS. The video series will debut heading into the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series™ race at Michigan International Speedway, sharing the greatest historical moments in NASCAR racing with viewers. NASCAR is migrating its 18-petabyte video archive to AWS, and will leverage Amazon Rekognition—an AWS service that adds intelligent image and video analysis to applications—to automatically tag specific video frames with metadata, such as driver, car, race, lap, time, and sponsors so they can easily search those tags to surface the most iconic moments from past races. By using AWS’s services, NASCAR expects to save thousands of hours of manual search time each year, and will be able to easily surface flashbacks like Dale Earnhardt Sr.’s 1987 “Pass in the Grass” or Denny Hamlin’s 2016 Daytona 500 photo finish, and quickly deliver these to fans via video clips on NASCAR.com and social media channels.

NASCAR will leverage AWS services to enhance its full range of media assets including websites, mobile applications, and social properties for its 80 million fans worldwide. NASCAR plans to use Amazon SageMaker to train deep learning models against 70 years of historical footage to enhance metadata and video analytics. With Amazon Transcribe, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service, NASCAR will be able to caption and time stamp every word of speech within archived videos so that NASCAR video producers can easily locate source footage via text searches. In addition, NASCAR will use AWS Media Services, including AWS Elemental MediaLive and AWS Elemental MediaStore, to support NASCAR Drive, which puts fans in the driver’s seat using in-car cameras, live audio, and live leaderboards. These AWS Media Services enable NASCAR to process, package, and store broadcast video content, including live races, for delivery to broadcast and industry partners.

“Speed and efficiency are key in racing and business which is why we chose AWS—the cloud with unmatched performance, the most comprehensive set of services, and the fastest pace of innovation—to accelerate our migration to the cloud,” said Craig Neeb, Executive Vice President of Innovation and Development, NASCAR. “Leveraging AWS to power our new video series gives our highly engaged fans a historical look at our sport while providing a sneak peek at the initial results of this exciting collaboration.”

“Amazon’s 20 years of machine learning experience, along with our broad analytics and machine learning capabilities, make us the best choice for organizations who want to use machine learning to gain insights into their data and establish new levels of engagement with their customers,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. “NASCAR is utilizing cloud technology to enhance the way people experience the sport and delivering even more impactful content to fans. AWS’s unmatched portfolio of cloud services gives NASCAR the most flexible and powerful tools to bring new elements of the sport to live broadcasts of races.”

About Amazon Web Services

For 13 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 165 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 66 Availability Zones (AZs) within 21 geographic regions, spanning the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Sweden, and the UK. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About NASCAR

The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, Inc. (NASCAR) is the sanctioning body for the No. 1 form of motorsports in the United States. NASCAR consists of three national series (Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series™, NASCAR Xfinity Series™, and NASCAR Gander Outdoors Truck Series™), three regional series, one local grassroots series, three international series and the Automobile Racing Club of America (ARCA). The International Motor Sports Association™ (IMSA®) governs the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship™, the premier U.S. sports car series. Based in Daytona Beach, Fla., with offices in eight cities across North America, NASCAR sanctions more than 1,200 races in more than 30 U.S. states, Canada, Mexico and Europe. For more information visit www.NASCAR.com and www.IMSA.com, and follow NASCAR on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat (‘NASCAR’).

Animated sci-fi feature “Next Gen” tells the story of a lonely, rebellious teenage girl who teams up with a top-secret robot to stop a madman’s plot for world domination. Featuring the voice talent of John Krasinski, Charlyne Yi, Jason Sudeikis, Michael Peña, David Cross and Constance Wu, the CG action-adventure was created as a joint effort by Baozou and Tangent Animation, a subsidiary of Tangent Studios.

Released globally by Netflix to favorable reviews, “Next Gen” marks the largest project that Tangent Animation has tackled to date both in size and scope, requiring four 2K resolution deliverables, including mono and stereo versions in English and Mandarin. With only 25 percent of the project’s rendering completed and three months until delivery, Tangent looked to AWS Thinkbox to help them scale compute resources with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), ultimately completing more than 65 percent of the film’s rendering with AWS.

“AWS Cloud was a godsend for us on ‘Next Gen;’ it allowed us to render about two and half versions of the movie in just 36 days and far outstripped our on-premises capabilities. Without it, lighting and rendering would have to have started nearly eight months ahead of time and that would have required an entirely different creative strategy,” said Jeff Bell, Tangent Studios COO and Co-founder. “We’ve always used Deadline for managing resources on premises, but our per hour compute costs are so low, we weren’t sure if the cloud was the right option for us until it became clear we needed a lot more CPU to get the job done. We couldn’t have hit our deadlines without AWS.”

Ken Zorniak, CEO and President, Tangent Studios added, “Removing the limitations of a physical farm allows creatives to make changes to the story and look until the last minute, then let the computers do the heavy lifting. Since artists receive shots back faster using AWS, they can work more effectively. It’s definitely improved our studio’s flow and throughput and that helps keep everyone motivated and engaged.”

Tangent deploys open source software for 3D production, primarily using Blender for content creation. Tangent’s local 600-node farm is housed at the studio’s Winnipeg headquarters, which has about 60 people who typically focus on asset creation, lighting and VFX. Much of Tangent’s animation is done out of its Toronto studio, which is about twice the size staff-wise and is designed to be highly flexible.

“Our Toronto office is run on a data center so looking to the cloud wasn’t a foreign concept,” Bell explained. “After just two months of setup, configuration and testing – which AWS Thinkbox helped us with, we went from being inexperienced to spinning up 3,000 AWS instances – five times the capacity of our local resources.”

Already well into production once they decided to leverage the AWS cloud, Tangent was able to use AWS Snowball, a data transport solution that can be sent to a studio’s location, to quickly load upwards of 100TB of data onto AWS servers. AWS Thinkbox helped them determine where to locate the data, and how to balance machine power and RAM needs with pricing and core availability, making use of economical Spot Instances where possible.

Looking to the future, Bell envisions broadening Tangent’s relationship with AWS. He shared, “I can see us moving our whole production pipeline to AWS: disk tiering for cold storage, remote users, backups, virtual workstations, and beyond. With AWS, we see a partner that we can rely on long term, not just to bring more cores online to finish a project but also a resource for the work we do beyond the animation studio in developing SaaS technology.”

Currently, Tangent Animation is working on a new project expected to announce in the coming weeks.

Portland, Ore. – April 4, 2019 – At NAB Show 2019 in Booth SU2202, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, will showcase advances for content creation, media supply chains, and content distribution to help customers be more agile and enhance quality across their video workflows. Demonstrations feature an extensive range of innovations for enhanced live and on-demand video workflows, such as next-gen transcoding, studio in the cloud, content protection, low latency, and personalization. Cloud-based machine learning capabilities will also be featured on the show floor for content redaction, highlight creation, video clipping, live subtitling, and metadata extraction.

“Customers visiting AWS at NAB this year will learn how they can harness the cloud to develop more nimble workflows that will help them deliver compelling consumer viewing experiences more quickly and efficiently,” said Alex Dunlap, General Manager for AWS Elemental. “We’re also offering the latest technologies to help customers make their video infrastructures smarter and more automated so that they can focus on building and monetizing their content.”

AWS is joined by 12 technology partners in booth SU2202 with solutions that help customers create, protect, distribute, and monetize media streaming video content. More than 60 Amazon Partner members across the show floor will demonstrate media solutions built on AWS and interoperable with AWS services to deliver scalable, resilient video workflows for customers.

Delivering Innovation through Content Creation

AWS will showcase a variety of solutions designed to help media enterprises of all types to create robust, state-of-the-art live and on-demand video experiences. Demonstrations include:

• Next-generation transcoding – AWS Elemental MediaConvert spotlights a range of advanced features for file-based video processing. Support for IMF inputs and CMAF outputs simplify video delivery. Integrated Quality-Defined Variable Bitrate (QVBR) rate control enables high-quality video while lowering bitrates, storage, and bandwidth requirements;
• Studio in the cloud – Users can deploy a creative studio in the cloud for visual effects, animation, and editing workloads. Scale rendering, virtual workstations, and data storage globally with AWS Thinkbox Deadline, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, and AWS Cloud storage options such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon FSx, and more;
• Enhanced live sports content – Amazon Machine Learning (Amazon ML) and AWS Elemental Media Services process sports content to extract metadata with activity and object detection for enhanced live sports coverage. Demonstrations also incorporate automated highlight clipping and on-screen graphics creation;
• Cloud DVR services – AWS Elemental MediaPackage enables an end-to-end cloud DVR workflow that lets content providers easily deliver DVR-like experiences, such as catch-up and start-over functionality for viewing on mobile and other over-the-top (OTT) devices;
• Advanced AV1 encoding – A technology demonstration illustrates the capabilities of the next-generation AV1 codec to improve video quality and reduce storage and distribution costs for live and VOD applications;

Raising the Value of Content Distribution

The AWS booth at NAB Show 2019 features new technologies and distribution solutions designed to advance content protection, simplify critical workflows, and enhance the value of video content:

• SPEKE-enabled content protection – The Secure Packager and Encoder Key Exchange (SPEKE), developed by AWS, is an open standard that simplifies content protection for video. On-premises and cloud solutions from AWS employ SPEKE to enable seamless integration with DRM key servers for robust content protection;
• Low latency for live video – Enhancing the audience experience for high-profile live events and gaming experiences, AWS Elemental MediaStore and Amazon CloudFront anchor an end-to-end live streaming video workflow that is designed to achieve sub-six-second latency from source to screen.
• B2B content distribution – AWS Elemental MediaConnect demonstrates live content distribution, including entitlements that let content owners quickly and easily furnish live video content to providers, with granular control over access and security;
• Serverless video playout –AWS Elemental MediaLive, MediaConvert and AWS Lambda combine to execute serverless channel playout, achieving linear channel distribution that increases operational efficiencies and significantly lowers the cost of over-the-top playout at scale;
• Personalized, content-aware advertising insertion – AWS Elemental MediaTailor performs real-time video ad insertion with support for VAST, VMAP, and VPAID standards, and a broad range of DASH functionality. Integrated machine learning services enable content-aware, personalized ads for increased reach, relevance, and quality for monetization campaigns.

Advancing the Media Supply Chain

AWS will highlight intelligent workflows and automated capabilities for improved viewer engagement, increased workload efficiency, and enhanced revenue opportunities. Demonstrations include:

• Media-to-cloud migration – Media asset management tools integrate with AWS Elemental MediaConvert, Amazon S3, and Amazon CloudFront to accelerate migration of large-scale video archives into the cloud. Built-in metadata tools improve search and management for massive media archives;
• Smart language workflows – AWS Elemental Media Services and Amazon Machine Learning work together to automate real-time transcription, caption creation, and multi-language subtitling and dubbing, as well as creating video clips based on caption text;
• Compliance and logo detection – Demonstrations incorporate machine learning models from the AWS Marketplace deployed with Amazon SageMaker to enable automated compliance, moderation, and redaction for live and on-demand video;
• Intelligent speech analysis – Amazon Machine Learning applied to news archives to analyze speeches for content and sentiment, automating insights through comparative assessments of past and present remarks made by politicians and other newsmakers.
• Live streaming subtitling – A deployable AWS Cloud Formation template automatically generates multi-language subtitles in real time for live streaming, accelerating accessibility and localization of video content for global distribution.
• Deep media archival – The new Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage class is the lowest-cost cloud storage offering from any provider and enables customers to eliminate digital tape from their media infrastructures. It is ideally suited to cold media archives and to second copy and disaster recovery needs.

4K 4Charity Fun Run

AWS will host its fifth 4K 4Charity Fun Run at the 2019 NAB Show on Tuesday, April 9 at 7:30 a.m. in Sunset Park, Las Vegas, Nev., raising awareness and funding for non-profits focused on increased diversity and inclusion. Organizers also revealed that an anonymous donor has issued a challenge grant of $30,000 if 750 participants are on the course for the event. Registration is open: http://www.4K4Charity.com/nab. Event proceeds will go toward Girls Who Code. Registration and sponsorship information is available here: https://4k4charity.com/. 

WASHINGTON—Raycom Media has licensed The Washington Post’s Arc Publishing platform to enhance digital publishing at 42 of its TV and radio stations.

The Arc platform offers new video tools that seamlessly integrate live broadcast streams with the broadcasters’ digital publishing stack. In this way, it automates workflows to make live broadcast video available for online publishing.

“Working with the Arc team, we were able to bring industry-leading digital publishing solutions to each of our local broadcast markets in record time,” said Joe Fiveash, executive vice president, Digital Media and Strategy at Raycom Media.

“Our viewers are increasingly engaging with our content both on the web and mobile apps, and the new video tools Arc offers allow us to better optimize the workflows between our broadcast systems and our digital properties to better serve those audiences.”

Arc’s video management system gives Raycom Media stations the ability to clip, crop and publish live video streams–even while they are still in progress—and distribute them via the web, mobile and social media, said The Washington Post. This is particularly useful in breaking news situations, allowing Raycom to publish live streams to its digital platforms during a broadcast.

The Arc platform is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and leverages AWS Elemental Media Services to make prep, processing and delivery of broadcast and over-the-top video from AWS Cloud fast and easy, it said. The Washington Post is owned by Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos. 

More information is available on the Arc Publishing website.

OWNZONES Media Network, an OTT EntTech company, today announced API integration between the OWNZONES Connect media logistics solution and AWS Elemental MediaConvert.

OWNZONES Connect, which is a “post house in the cloud” media logistics solution, has made heavy use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AWS Media Services since the company’s inception.

OWNZONES is providing its expertise to Magnolia Pictures, the theatrical and home entertainment distribution arm of Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban’s 2929 Entertainment to help expand their traditional cinematic products to the over-the-top (OTT) TV market.

“Magnolia Pictures’ decision to partner with OWNZONES three years ago marked a critical turning point in their OTT business as they are no longer required to make significant investments in costly post production software and have the flexibility of scaling on demand and fill support of complex file formats,” said Aaron Sloman, Chief Technology officer for OWNZONES.

Sloman added: “Our developers have created a state of the art, forward-thinking solution that enables video providers the ability to process and deliver high quality video streams for broadcast television and multiscreen devices with the security, scalability and simplicity of cloud-based solutions and pay-as-you-go pricing. We are delighted to announce API integration with AWS and to provide our customers access to a complete digital content supply and fast, flexible access to the cloud.”

“We value OWNZONES’ technical expertise and knowledge that it has helped pave the way for us to reach a new generation of consumers,” said Magnolia Pictures’ Jeff Cuban.

“With high-speed streaming enabled by AWS Elemental MediaConvert, HD-quality controls and a future-ready cloud architecture powered by OWNZONES, Magnolia Pictures is well equipped to deliver an engaging online entertainment experience for movie lovers any time and every time.”

NEVADA CITY, CALIF.—The Telestream Cloud transcoding and media processing workflow is the choice for Wazee Digital for its cloud asset management service. The Telestream Cloud workflow runs on Amazon Web Services.

Wazee Digital’s cloud-native products—Core, Commerce and Digital Media Hub—enable content creators to make their content available for global publishing, syndication, advertising and sponsorship. To better manage this, Wazee Digital is shifting its operation to Telestream Cloud, which provides a range of media processing services, including transcoding, workflow automation, timed text transcription and quality assurance.

Content owners can now upload their media files to the cloud storage of their choice or upload it to storage buckets associated with Wazee Digital’s AWS service. Media discovered by Wazee Digital’s Core is automatically on-boarded for media processing.

SAN DIEGO—Verimatrix, which aims to boost network-connected devices and services, has a new partner for cloud-based video delivery, announcing an API integration between its MultiRights OTT multi-DRM security system and Amazon Web Services Media Services. The specific AWS products for this integration are the AWS Elemental MediaConvert and AWS Elemental MediaPackage.

The cloud-based AWS Media Services can ingest, process, package and deliver video content with pay-as-you-go pricing. With this new integration, pay-TV operators, broadcasters and OTT providers can process and deliver video streams for broadcast television and multi-screen devices with the same capabilities as cloud-based solutions.

Using MultiRights OTT, operators can deploy multi-network services with a platform that will accommodate evolving security regimes and business models, while ensuring differentiated multi-screen video services across all device categories, per Verimatrix. The multi-DRM system brings set-top boxes, consumer devices and HTML5 browsers under a unified rights management security umbrella for secure content playback.

Live video workflows combine real-time encoding using AWS Elemental MediaLive and just-in-time packaging, origination and encryption using AWS Elemental MediaPackage with MultiRights OTT. AWS Elemental MediaConvert file-to-file video transcoding service works directly with MultiRights OTT, creating on-demand assets for broadcast and multi-screen delivery. MultiRights OTT can be used on-premises as a virtualized instance hosted in-house by the provider, or via the Verimatrix Secure Cloud hosting and management service. Additional features include optional video watermarking and real-time, cluod-based analytics.

SEATTLE—Amazon Web Services has launched five new offerings within the AWS Elemental Media Services cloud portfolio to help customers build end to end workflows for both live and on-demand video with the professional features, image quality, and reliability needed to deliver premium video experiences to viewers across a multitude of devices.

The company is touting its new services as a way to give its customers more flexibility as they move from productions using specialized broadcast equipment and customized revenue models to cloud-based live productions that can provide personalized advertising on a “pay as you go” monetization arrangement scaled across multiple platforms. Its new services, the company said, simplify what were previously labor-intensive processes. Projects that once took months or years—such as standing up 24x7 live broadcast channels, converting a library of video-on-demand (VOD) assets for distribution, or streaming a high-profile live event—can now be completed in a fraction of the time with the new services, AWS Elemental said.

“For the better part of six decades, professional-grade video workflows were limited to a few major industry players who could afford to build and maintain customized infrastructure that would be updated only once or twice each decade,” said Alex Dunlap, General Manager at AWS Elemental. “These companies spent a great deal of time, money, and focus operating infrastructure with resources that could have been better spent creating great content and viewer experiences. We built AWS Elemental Media Services to let customers focus on delivering top-quality video reliably to any device, everywhere, without the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing infrastructure. This not only helps traditional video providers innovate faster, but it also opens up new opportunities for startups, government agencies, schools, and multinational enterprises that, before today, had limited access to premium-quality video technology.”

AWS Elemental Media Services include the following individual services:

· AWS Elemental MediaConvert: Format and compress video-on-demand content for delivery to virtually any playback device, with high-quality video transcoding and broadcast-level features.

· AWS Elemental MediaLive: Encode broadcast-grade live video for televisions or connected devices. Quickly stand up broadcast channels or live events and deliver them reliably to your viewers.

· AWS Elemental MediaPackage: Prepare and protect live video streams for delivery to Internet devices with rich playback experience features such as start-over TV.

· AWS Elemental MediaStore: Deliver video from high-performance storage optimized for media.

· AWS Elemental MediaTailor: Insert targeted advertising into your video without sacrificing quality to increase viewer engagement and boost revenues.

Customers involved in the extensive private preview of AWS Elemental Media Services include BT, Pac-12 Networks, Amazon Prime Video, FOX Sports Australia, fuboTV, NINE in Australia, Spuul VOD in Singapore, cloud media services provider M2A Media, Cinépolis and Imagica.

SEATTLE—Amazon Web Services is the latest company to join the Streaming Video Alliance.

The announcement coincides with the third birthday of the Alliance, an industry forum composed of leading companies from the online video ecosystem.

Other members of the Alliance include Cisco Systems, Dolby, IBM, Limelight Networks, Sky and Viacom.

"The new dynamics of OTT are radically disrupting the media landscape across the globe, and we need to remember that the OTT market and online video are still very young when compared with television. The industry collaboration and unification that the Alliance provides its members is key to solving some of the industry's biggest obstacles in the proliferation of OTT TV viewing," said Jason Thibeault, executive =director of the Streaming Video Alliance. 

"From the very beginning of the Alliance, OTT companies have been part of the conversation, and we're excited to continue expanding the OTT expertise and participation inside of the Alliance."

This story originally appeared on TVT's sister publication TVB Europe. 

SILVER SPRING, MD.—Discovery Communications has wrapped up its transition to playout from Amazon Web Service’s public cloud based on technology from Evertz Microsystems, the network and Evertz announced this week.

The playout system, based on technology from Evertz, including Mediator-X, Overture-RT LIVE and Render-X, can be used to play to air pre-recorded as well as live programming.

Discovery Communications, which counts the Discovery Channel, TLC and ID among its brands, first used the new solution for a total of 40 hours of live coverage of the Barrett-Jackson auto auction from Las Vegas Oct. 19 and again on Oct. 21 on Velocity, said Dan Turow, vice president of File Based Solutions at Evertz, during a telephone interview.

“Evertz’ cloud-based playout solution has transformed Discovery Communications’ playout operations and has given us the scalability, flexibility and agility to address continuously evolving business and technical challenges,” Brinton Miller, senior vice president of Technology Strategy & Architecture at Discovery, said in a press announcement.

The playout setup also uses Evertz Software Defined Video Networking (SDVN) solutions using IPX Switch Fabrics, Network Address Translators (NAT) and encoding/decoding products.Video is moved to and from the cloud with mezzanine level compression as a transport stream, said Turow.

Amazon Web Services hosts the Evertz cloud-based playout solution natively. Six data centers, distributed across two geographic areas –one in northern Virginia and the other in Ireland-- host Mediator-X, Overture-RT LIVE and Render-X. Mediator-X provides Media Asset Management (MAM) functionality, serves as a workflow engine and provides playout automation. It prioritizes and automates file transfers to and from Amazon S3 storage.

Secondary events, such as logo and graphics insertion, SCTE metadata messaging, audio loudness correction, Nielsen watermarking and Dolby D encoding, are the domain of Evertz’ Overturn-RT LIVE, the company’s software modular playout engine. Discovery can scale its operations and recover playout instances using automated orchestration methods.

For more information on Discovery's move to the cloud, check out this recent webinar: Project On-Ramp: Migrating Discovery's Media Supply Chain to the Cloud.

FARMINGDALE, N.Y.—EEG customers can now access the company’s Scribe Pro Captioning suite on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This closed captioning suite allows for the creation of professional captions without acquiring additional software, but rather with hourly pricing.

The Scribe Pro Captioning suite provides features like reduced-speed playback, batch time shifting, and frame-accurate jog editing. The suite can be launched on-demand through AWS Marketplace as a virtual machine image and operated through a standard remote desktop connection. Users of the captioning service on AWS can pay for a specific amount of time to use the service, whether it be an hour, day, week or more.

The Scribe virtual machines launched in AWS Marketplace also include EEG’s CCPlay FilePro software for embedding closed caption data in master video formats like MPEG transport streams and MXF. Additional integration from the Scribe software menus provides access to the EEG Cloud network for access to proxy video assets, as well as automated FCC caption quality checking.