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Amazon Interactive Video Service – Add Live Video to Your Apps and Websites

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Re: Amazon Interactive Video Service – Add Live Video to Your Apps and Websites

#11

Post by jontro »

reggieband wrote: post #10
jontro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird that they just not charge for egress as with other services. Also it seems a lot cheaper, assuming full hd is 1 MB/s. That would mean approx 3.6GB/h which would come out at 0.54$/h in comparison to their 0.15$/h pricing

> Weird that they just not charge for egress as with other services. My guess is they are charging ingress in place of some equivalent of compute necessary to transmux. That cost is fixed regardless of number of viewers. Their docs state "The maximum input for a Standard channel is 8.5 Mbps and 1080p resolution (full HD)." but they could be outputting something less than that.

The FAQ states the following "If you send the maximum 8.5Mbps, 1080p60 stream, Amazon IVS will create 8.5Mbps 1080p60, 3Mbps 720p60, 2Mbps 720p30, 1.2Mbps 480p30, 800Kbps 360p30, and 400Kbps 160p30 renditions in an ABR stream."

I assume you will only be charged for full hd if the client is streaming it

Re: Amazon Interactive Video Service – Add Live Video to Your Apps and Websites

#12

Post by moralestapia »

>Firstly, the video is low latency, which means that the time between you broadcasting and the time the video shows up on your viewer’s screens can be as low as 2-3 seconds.

Excuse my ignorance, and I'm sure 2 seconds is probably an engineering feat, but I'm genuinely curious. What is it that prevents latency to go as down as a few hundred ms (pretty much close to and IP round trip) ?

Re: Amazon Interactive Video Service – Add Live Video to Your Apps and Websites

#13

Post by mabbo »

reggieband wrote: post #2

Price is pretty good, surprisingly. Looks like they take RTMP in and output m3u8 (probably fmp4 behind the scenes). 2 second latency is also not bad. Larger streamers on Twitch can get ~20k concurrent viewers. A long streaming day would be 10 hours. They would also be streaming from NA so using their example pricing suggests: Input: $2/hour * 10 hours = $20 Output: $0.15 * 10 * 20,000 = $30k A worst case scenario of…

Imagine you're a University that needs to, as quickly as possible, build a system to have streaming video for all your classes. Otherwise, you've got students and parents saying they want their money back because they paid for real classes, with Q&A and a live professor, and not pre-recorded videos.

200 viewers for 2 hours sound about right for a typical large University lecture. Typical students are paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars per lecture. $64 per class would put a dent into the University's budget, but not a huge one. And the fact that you can now scale a class to 1000 to 2000 students simultaneously, well that's cheaper than hiring more professors.

In short, I don't think this is meant to compete with Twitch or Youtube. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a niche it can work within.

(Bias note: I work for a totally unrelated branch of AWS. My thoughts and words are my own and are not representing my employer in any way.)

Re: Amazon Interactive Video Service – Add Live Video to Your Apps and Websites

#14

Post by nameoda »

The audio at the top of the page, marked "Voiced by Amazon Polly" has so much dissonance - they've inserted fake sounds to seem as if the speaker is drawing breath, which sounds pretty realistic, but the actual enunciation of words is so robotic and fake-sounding :)

Re: Amazon Interactive Video Service – Add Live Video to Your Apps and Websites

#15

Post by bigtones »

nameoda wrote: post #14

The audio at the top of the page, marked "Voiced by Amazon Polly" has so much dissonance - they've inserted fake sounds to seem as if the speaker is drawing breath, which sounds pretty realistic, but the actual enunciation of words is so robotic and fake-sounding :)

Yes, I immediately noticed that when I started listening too. You can hear him inhale at the start of a paragraph which is kind of freaky, because his voice is super-robotic.

Amazon Polly is in the uncanny valley of text to speech now.

Re: Amazon Interactive Video Service – Add Live Video to Your Apps and Websites

#16

Post by wrkronmiller »

mabbo wrote: post #13
reggieband wrote: post #2

Price is pretty good, surprisingly. Looks like they take RTMP in and output m3u8 (probably fmp4 behind the scenes). 2 second latency is also not bad. Larger streamers on Twitch can get ~20k concurrent viewers. A long streaming day would be 10 hours. They would also be streaming from NA so using their example pricing suggests: Input: $2/hour * 10 hours = $20 Output: $0.15 * 10 * 20,000 = $30k A worst case scenario of…

Imagine you're a University that needs to, as quickly as possible, build a system to have streaming video for all your classes. Otherwise, you've got students and parents saying they want their money back because they paid for real classes, with Q&A and a live professor, and not pre-recorded videos. 200 viewers for 2 hours sound about right for a typical large University lecture. Typical students are paying hundreds…

Interesting point. I'd be surprised if most universities were trying to build out apps for the current quarantine though.

More likely they just email links to Zoom conferences or something to that effect, no?

Re: Amazon Interactive Video Service – Add Live Video to Your Apps and Websites

#17

Post by mmcclure »

moralestapia wrote: post #12

>Firstly, the video is low latency, which means that the time between you broadcasting and the time the video shows up on your viewer’s screens can be as low as 2-3 seconds. Excuse my ignorance, and I'm sure 2 seconds is probably an engineering feat, but I'm genuinely curious. What is it that prevents latency to go as down as a few hundred ms (pretty much close to and IP round trip) ?

This definitely isn't ignorance, it's a very, very common question. The TL;DR on it is: cost.

The most cost-effective way of delivering video is using some form of HTTP streaming (like HLS or DASH). In a nutshell, the player downloads a manifest that tells it where to find chunks of video, which are downloaded and cached in normal, commodity CDNs. Everything is stateless and is scaled like any other form of HTTP download. To do all of this you end up needing to transcode the incoming stream. All along the way through this process introduces latency, and for reference 20 seconds is perfectly normal HLS latency, so credit where credit's due, this is really impressive. One of my colleagues wrote about the state of low latency last year[1], and considered You can get lower latency, of course, but typically that involves stateful connections. All of that cheap commodity stuff that comes with HTTP streaming above goes away, and scaling to a large number of viewers can get extremely costly (and operationally difficult).

[1] https://mux.com/blog/the-low-latency-live-streaming-landscap...

Re: Amazon Interactive Video Service – Add Live Video to Your Apps and Websites

#19

Post by jcun4128 »

woeirua wrote: post #8

The proliferation of half-baked services at AWS needs to end. There are way too many services that are just enticing enough to get you to play around with it, but then you realize it's totally crippled and unusable for most actual workflows, or that someone else already does it way better. They need to focus on a few that are commercially viable and let other companies prove out the rest.

I saw they have this satellite ground station service, I wonder what that would actually allow you to do.

Re: Amazon Interactive Video Service – Add Live Video to Your Apps and Websites

#20

Post by ponker »

woeirua wrote: post #8

The proliferation of half-baked services at AWS needs to end. There are way too many services that are just enticing enough to get you to play around with it, but then you realize it's totally crippled and unusable for most actual workflows, or that someone else already does it way better. They need to focus on a few that are commercially viable and let other companies prove out the rest.

A lot of people would rather use 20 mediocre products from one vendor than 20 fantastic products from different vendors. I’m like this with Target —- I don’t want to go to multiple stores so I limit my household items to things that Target sells.
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