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AWS Media Services: A Guide to Live Streaming

Byadmin

Live streaming is not an uncommon phenomenon in today’s media. Most of the online content today includes live streaming, and this form of content has been growing in terms of popularity in recent years. However, live streaming has been around for decades as webcasts and televised sporting events were live streams as well. 

Millennials are huge consumers of live-streamed content. Creators have now turned to platforms like YouTube and Twitch, where they can easily live stream. Here is a guide to how live streaming works and how people are using this way of creating content and conversation. 

How to Prepare for Live Streaming 

Live streaming might seem like a complete impromptu and spur of the moment thing, but it requires a lot of planning. It isn’t improvised like most streamers, businesses, and content creators lead you to believe. For a live stream to generate revenue, you need to prepare well. 

  • Choose your niche or topic. This means you need to decide what you will be streaming about. This will help reflect your content direction and help you narrow down a range of popular choices. 
  • Who is your audience? Define your target audience. If you don’t know who’ll be watching, you can’t create content that will resonate with them. 
  • Set a goal for your live stream, which means you have to decide what it is that you’re aiming to achieve. 
  • Promote your live stream. People will only tune in if you tell them about it. 

Choosing a Platform 

Once you have planned your live stream and gathered the equipment you would need, you have to choose the platform for your stream. The platform depends on the overall direction you would be taking with your stream. 

  • For general live streaming purposes with good exposure, you can choose Facebook Live, YouTube Live, or Twitter Live. These platforms are perfect if you already have a following there. 
  • If you’re a gamer, there are platforms like YouTube Gaming, Twitch, and Facebook Gaming that can allow you to dedicate live streams to gaming and find a fan following. 
  • For artists or content creators, you can use creative platforms like Mixcloud or Picarto, where you can live stream your creative process for music or artwork. 
  • For businesses and e-commerce business owners, LinkedIn Live, Amazon Live, or your own website is a great way to get more views and engagement. 

Tips for Successful Live Streaming 

Before we end this guide, here are some words of wisdom. When you’re live streaming, make sure your stream is high-quality and looks professional. Practice what you want to talk about because people will be listening. Don’t hold yourself back. Avoid poor quality as that can be a turn-off for many, and test your equipment beforehand to reduce any mistakes or mishaps that could occur. 

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Benefits of Using AWS Live Streaming  

AWS has launched Amazon Interactive Video Streaming Service to make live streaming easy to organizations. They provide Amazon IVS services on two modules. Amazon IVS and Amazon IVS on S3. You can pick up any one of the services that suits your business needs and demands.  

Let’s look at the benefits of Using AWS Services for live streaming 

Interactivity 

Interactivity is the most highlighted feature of AWS. It is simple to change your application based on what is occurring at each point in the movie when used with the player SDK. Polls may be made, product carousels can be updated, viewing counts can be displayed, and much more. 

 Other AWS Media Services: While interactivity is technically possible with some of the other AWS Media Services, it necessitates more special work on your end to start the metadata insertion process, feed the metadata via the video pipeline, and detect and start actions inside your application. Elemental Live and MediaLive both offer rendering on-screen graphics from HTML5 sites as an alternative that may be suitable for your application. With the aid of this technology, scoreboards and other graphic components from outside data sources may be added to the stream. 

Low latency 

Another essential feature of Amazon IVS is low latency. Glass to glass (camera to screen) latency under 5 seconds is often delivered by the platform in conjunction with the player SDK. 

 Other AWS Media Services: Because they are built on standards, AWS Media Services are perfect for delivering services to native players like Apple’s AVPlayer, Google’s Shaka player, and other for-pay or open-source software. Low latency DASH is supported by AWS Elemental Live. It can achieve glass to glass latency as low as two seconds when combined with AWS Elemental MediaStore, Amazon CloudFront, and a player that supports DASH with chunked mp4 fragments. 

Content protection 

Although Amazon IVS does not yet provide a way to encrypt content, it does offer a way to safeguard channel access by allowing playback sessions. Refer to the IVS user guide’s section on creating private channels for more information on how to restrict viewer access. 

Other AWS Media Services: Using the Secure Package Encoder Key Exchange (SPEKE) protocol, AWS Media Services provide a variety of content protection options. This means that clients can use a variety of specialized third-party vendors to safeguard their material across numerous formats utilizing standard encryption techniques (Apple Fairplay, Microsoft PlayReady, and Google Widevine). 

Ad insertion 

The possibility to monetize broadcasts by inserting pre-roll or mid-roll advertisements is not presently available through Amazon IVS. 

AWS Media Services has extensive ad insertion functionality, nevertheless, among its other services. Either by passing SCTE-35 ad markers from the input stream or by inserting markers using the service APIs, MediaLive can prepare material for ad insertion. Based on packaging kinds and AWS Elemental, Media Package provides extra controls and filters. Serving customized adverts to viewers at scale is made possible with MediaTailor, a server-side monetization tool. 

Automatic Stream Start 

Automatic stream starts in Amazon IVS: When a new channel is created in Amazon IVS, it is immediately ready for streaming. More significantly, when a channel receives video input, streaming begins immediately. Because your users can start streaming video at any time, this is excellent for user-generated content (UGC) apps and makes orchestration really simple. 

Other AWS Media Services: Before you can start pushing source content to a MediaLive channel, it needs to be launched and functioning. After getting a start command via the AWS Management Console or APIs, it takes a MediaLive channel some time to get into a working condition and start producing content. 

Looking for AWS live streaming services? 

You are at the right place. We provide AWS Media Managed Services for live streaming with top-level security. We have a team of experts who can guide you with live streaming and other media services. We also have AWS Managed DevOps Services and are an AWS Service provider in Princeton. 

Get in touch with us today !