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.
