Ten years ago this week, Amazon Web Services announced the acquisition of Elemental Technologies, a pioneer in video processing technology. Founded in Portland, Ore. by Sam Blackman, Jesse Rosenzweig, and Brian Lewis in 2006, Elemental had already established its role as an influential player in the rapidly growing video streaming market.

Elemental was instrumental in accelerating live and on-demand video processing using GPU-based appliances, and in 2014 launched Elemental Delta, a video delivery platform providing next-generation TV services.

Brought into the AWS fold a year later, Elemental began its evolution as a cloud-based video processing company. In 2017, AWS Elemental Media Services was launched, introducing a purpose-built suite of tools that changed the way media companies create, produce, monetize, and deliver content. Originally comprised of AWS Elemental MediaConvert, MediaLive, MediaPackage, MediaStore, and MediaTailor, the services were expanded with the release of MediaConnect in 2018.

Since then, AWS Elemental Media Services has played an important role in tackling some of streaming’s biggest challenges, including an NFL Christmas doubleheader in 2024 livestreamed on Netflix to 65 million United States (U.S.) viewers tuning in for at least one minute of action. It also helped Tubi deliver the most-streamed Super Bowl in history, to a peak audience of 15.5 million, and helped NBCUniversal insert personalized advertisements across 5,000 hours of Paris Olympics content on Peacock also in 2024.

In 2017, AWS made history when it hosted a live chat from the International Space Station during the NAB Show using Elemental's technology to produce the first-ever live 4K video stream from space.

Manish Rao, who joined the company as GM of AWS Elemental in 2024, spoke with TV Tech about his evolving relationship with AWS Elemental, which began years before.

“I was running all of the video technologies for Prime Video for about seven years, so I worked very closely with the Elemental team in building a lot of these products, because Prime Video is always the first tester, first reference customer,” he said. “So I've been working with Elemental through the evolution of their cloud journey. Prior to the acquisition, Elemental was primarily an on-prem hardware video processing platform.”

New products or services rolled out over the past decade include MediaConvert, which processes video files to prepare high-quality on-demand content, MediaLive, which encodes high-quality live video for broadcast and streaming, while MediaPackage prepares and protects content. MediaStore stores and originates video assets, MediaTailor creates and monetizes personalized linear channels with dynamic ad insertion, while MediaConnect transports live video reliably and securely. Quality-defined variable bitrate (QVBR) encoding, a Technology and Engineering Emmy Award winning feature, was introduced in 2018 to help customers save on storage and distribution costs while increasing video quality.

Automated adaptive bit rate (ABR) configuration was added to MediaConvert in 2020 to pick ideal renditions for the ABR configuration of video. Soon after, AWS Elemental Link, a device that simplified cloud connectivity via linking live video sources to MediaLive was released with a UHD version to follow. Also launched in 2020, AWS Cloud Digital Interface (AWS CDI), helped spur the growth of live cloud-based production by providing network technology for reliably transporting uncompressed live video between applications in the cloud.

In 2017, the company suffered a tragic loss with the untimely passing of Sam Blackman. Although he wasn’t with Elemental at the time, Manish met Sam several times prior to joining AWS Elemental and remembers him for his dedication and enthusiasm.

“Sam was very down to earth,” he said. Reflecting on the first time he met Sam, ”I arrived early at an executive briefing conference, and Sam was already there, and he spoke about his family and Portland. He was a very charismatic person, and very in tune with what was going on in the market.”

Manish says that the changes in the streaming market and AWS Elemental’s technological milestones over the past decade have positioned AWS Elemental to thrive in the years ahead.

“The media industry is undergoing a generational shift from broadcast to streaming; I think, over the last two years, streaming has outgrown terrestrial broadcast,” he said. “And so our customers are looking to us to develop new products to make that transformation a lot easier. And with Gen AI coming into the landscape, I think customers are looking to us to both Elemental and AWS to help them through deliver better new viewing experiences to the Gen Z audience, increase audience reach globally, optimize costs through workflow automation and improve ad revenue.”

As part of the ten-year anniversary celebration, AWS will showcase a timeline of Elemental history at Stand 5.C90 during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam. AWS Elemental experts will also be on hand to answer questions in the Builder zone.

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’).

Leading in-flight broadband internet provider Gogo recently committed to moving its entire infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS), going all-in on the world’s leading cloud. Gogo is improving in-flight internet and entertainment experiences for millions of passengers around the world, leveraging a range of AWS services, including analytics, serverless, database, and storage. AWS services help the company to develop and deploy applications in hours instead of days, double the number of airlines it supports with its current workforce, and take an idea from concept to production much faster.

The company also uses AWS Elemental Live video processing and delivery to provide the consistency and low latency required for live and on-demand video at 30,000 feet. Gogo’s transition to AWS comes at a time when the demand for content is intensifying, with 60 percent of global airline passengers citing in-flight Wi-Fi availability as a necessity when choosing an airline and booking a flight. That number is considerable given that the equivalent of more than half the world’s population (4.1 billion) took off in airplanes in 2017.

A pioneer of in-flight entertainment experiences, Gogo was the first to enable commercial airlines to stream video to passengers’ smart tablets, to stream pre-theatrical and first-run movie titles to devices, and to install FTE wireless systems aboard thousands of aircraft. To help airlines maintain high-quality viewing experiences and scale with passenger demand for more varieties of in-flight entertainment, the company is using AWS Elemental Live to process and deliver live and on-demand video services on board more than 2,500 commercial aircraft.

GogoTV, Gogo’s live TV service, relies extensively on AWS Elemental solutions to power transcoding for 24 live TV channels across five airlines. Distributed from a centralized headend in the US, GogoTV captures content from international providers. That content is backhauled via fiber to the Gogo IPTV headend, where it is transcoded to High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) using AWS Elemental Live. In addition to HEVC, AWS Elemental also provides support for statistical channel multiplexing. As a result, Gogo is able to deliver consistently broadcast-quality viewing experiences with low latency to passengers. AWS Elemental solutions also enable Gogo to use significantly less satellite communications bandwidth.

To find out more about how Gogo is using AWS services, please visit https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/gogo-goes-all-aws

Implementing HDR makes sense for your media operation if you understand that High Dynamic Range (HDR) is not just about more pixels, it’s about better pixels. Whether you are a content creator, broadcaster, cable/satellite operator or OTT streaming service provider, the opportunity is now as HDR video is expected to be the consumer technology taking the television experience to the next level.

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PORTLAND, ORE.—Brazil’s Globo.com continues to build its video infrastructure with the help of Elemental Technologies, recently announcing the addition of Elemental’s video processing system to deliver 4K video-on-demand services. This new technology allows for the process streaming of 4K content with HEVC compression.

To satisfy the VoD services for its affiliates across Brazil, Globo.com added Elemental Server transcoders to its existing infrastructure that was comprised of Elemental Live, Elemental Server and Elemental Conductor systems, with Elemental APIs simplifying integration with other systems. Elemental’s software-defined video approach allows HEVC encoding, which provides beneficial compression ratios for online delivery of 4K video.

With the new system, Globo.com can deliver 4K VoD services, connecting online audiences to its TV broadcast networks, OTT television service and film studio.

PORTLAND, ORE.—Elemental will arrive in Amsterdam for IBC 2016 with the goal of showcasing its on-premises and cloud-based video technology. The new technology is designed to allow for broadcast and multiscreen content delivery and will be demonstrated with Amazon Web Services.

Highlights of what Elemental will bring to this year’s show include its unified video infrastructure, which features high bitrate encoding, supporting HEVC 4:2:2 10-bit encoding at up to 80 Mbps or AVC High 4:2:2 Intra Profile 10-bit encoding; DVB/DTH linear system that enables customers to deploy 24/7 linear services; live channel playout with dynamic content control and motion graphic overlay; and statistical multiplexing to mix and match different codecs with workflows and delivery networks.

The company will also offer migration to the cloud technology. This includes Amazon S3 integration with support for live channel playout and VOD content storage; enhanced output capabilities, like the newly available HEVC 4:2:2 and AVC High 4:2:2 Intra Profile outputs; Amazon Direct Content to optimize media asset transfer to the AWS Cloud; live broadcasting from the cloud; and Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration.

Next-generation technology examples from Elemental are also slated to be on hand. Examples include advanced video management; SDI over IP technology with support for SMPTE 2022-6 uncompressed video over IP and SMPTE 2022-5 forward error correction; HDR; virtual reality; dynamic ad insertion; and multiscreen monetization.

In addition, Elemental will take part in the show’s technical paper presentations and will host Tech Talks with Nevion and Teleste. The company has also organized the 4K4Charity Fun Run.

IBC 2016 takes place from Sept. 8-13 in Amsterdam.

PORTLAND, ORE.—Software-defined video systems provider Elemental is serving as a key player in the 2016 Summer Olympics currently underway, helping stream content to a trio of South American broadcasters. The Portland, Ore.-based company has announced that it has provided its video processing technology to Brazilian-based Globosat and Net Brazil, as well as Uruguay’s Antel.

Globosat is utilizing the Elemental technology to stream live and video-on-demand coverage of the Games, including catch-up TV functionality. The broadcaster will also have Elemental gear to support the future deployment of SMPTE 2022-6 for transporting media signals over IP. Elemental Live software is used to encode the content for live OTT delivery, including programming in 4K.

Globosat is also providing 40 raw channels over IP to Net Brazil, which will then in turn use its own suite of Elemental encoding and packaging systems to transcode the signals to multi-bitrate services. After encryption, the channels are ready for distribution over the Net content delivery network to hybrid set-top boxes and multiscreen devices. Elemental Live is also being used to incorporate the SporTV application logo into signals for multiscreen delivery and Elemental Delta video delivery platform is being used for packaging functionality.

For Antel, the broadcaster is using Elemental video processing to power its Tier III Datacenter. The Elemental technology encodes feeds for the Games from a broadcast center in Rio de Janeiro for delivery via Antel’s VeraTV OTT service. The headend for VeraTV utilizes Elemental Live, Elemental Server video processing and delivery platform, Elemental Conductor to manage workflows, and Elemental Delta for CDN origination and OTT services.

The 2016 Summer Olympics are currently underway in Rio de Janeiro and will run through Aug. 21.

Here is a link to the Globosat, NET and Elemental press event that took place on Aug. 17 in Rio.

Read more about how broadcasters are covering the Rio Games at our Live@TheRioOlympics social media hub.

PORTLAND, ORE. & LONDON—Elemental Technologies has announced that its software is being used to standardized communication services company BT’s traditional and multiscreen headend services. The software will help to unify and expand the company’s BT TV Everywhere, BT Sport App and BT Ultra HD services.

BT utilizes Elemental for video coding (HEVC/H.265) and 4K content processing and delivery, specifically for its BT Sport Ultra HD live sports channel and the offer of Netflix in UHD on BT TV. BT also added end-to-end software defined video (SDV) technology from Elemental to support the launch of five new channels on BT TV Everywhere. For the BT Sport App, Elemental helps deliver live streaming sports content via multiscreen devices.

Specifically for BT TV Everywhere, Elemental manages a unified headend for subscription linear channels delivered to IPTV set-top boxes, as well as multiscreen devices. This includes the Elemental Conductor software, which manages Elemental Live encoder clusters that process channels of standard and HD content for delivery at a standard bitrate; the streams then pass to Elemental Delta for packaging to enable live-to-VOD delivery to connected devices. With this infrastructure, BT says it can scale from 90 to 250 channels and provide live, on-demand and time-shift services.

To help highlight their collaboration, BT and Elemental recently held a special event in London featuring live UEFA seminifinal coverage between Manchester City and Real Madrid in 4K.

 SEATTLE AND PORTLAND, ORE.--Amazon Web Services, the cloud video unit of the retail giant, has inked a deal to acquire Elemental Technologies, a multiscreen video specialist that counts customers such as Comcast, Sky, HBO, DirecTV and CBS Interactive.

They didn’t disclose the terms of the deal, but The Information reports that AWS is paying about $500 million in cash. Founded in 2006, Elemental has raised $41 million.

Elemental’s software-focused platform, which runs on off-the-shelf hardware, supports both live and on-demand streaming, and will be more tightly integrated with the AWS Cloud platform. Elemental will continue to operate its business under its existing brand, and serve its range of clients that span cable operators, broadcasters, governments, and enterprise customers. They expect to close the deal in the fourth quarter of 2015.

More details are available at Multichannel News.