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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

#21

Post by ponker »

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…

This isn’t for consumer streaming — those people will still use Twitch. This is for people building things like corporate meeting software for which the users will never be close to 20,000 concurrent and the costs of $30k don’t even get looked at.

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

#22

Post by ponker »

mmcclure wrote: post #17
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 down…

You mean all those Twitch streamers see their chats More than 4 seconds after the relevant video has elapsed? And can you explain what you mean by “stateful”? Thanks

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

#23

Post by gundmc »

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…

My University had GSuite for all students and faculty. Meet supports up to 250 participants for a normal call and Livestream only for up to 100,000 viewers.

I imagine Microsoft has a similar offering for schools that use their products. I don't see a case where it makes sense for schools to be rolling their own livestream platform and paying these fees.

Edit: I'm not positive if the Livestream capabilities are included in the free Education package or just the enterprise package.

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

#24

Post by tanilama »

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 mean this also depends on pricing. If they are cheap, then there is a place for them to exist.

But I agree, too much stuff under the AWS umbrella, and trivial ones like this, will impact the brand image.

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

#25

Post by jgalt212 »

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.

No kidding, when I met with an AWS salesperson, I joked that AWS had more services than there are nouns in the dictionary. He quickly rattled off the current grand total of services, but would not make an attempt at listing them all.

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

#26

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#27

Post by mmcclure »

ponker wrote: post #22
mmcclure wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 down…

You mean all those Twitch streamers see their chats More than 4 seconds after the relevant video has elapsed? And can you explain what you mean by “stateful”? Thanks

> all those Twitch streamers see their chats More than 4 seconds after the relevant video has elapsed

Yep! I think Twitch can sometimes be at 4 seconds or less for what it's worth, but yes, that delay is real. It's generally not really noticeable because the communication is totally async; the streamer is doing other stuff, finishing other thoughts, etc, then can get to messages as they see them.

> can you explain what you mean by “stateful”?

Sure! I was talking about what kind of connection is necessary to deliver the video. A lot of real-time video solutions require stateful connections to the client, which means that once the client connects, the connection is kept open, and video data is streamed via that connection. Common examples on the web are things like WebSockets and WebRTC, but it gets really expensive because you basically have to maintain a persistent connection with every single viewer and it makes it impossible (or extremely difficult) to do any kind of meaningful caching.

Stateless connections on the other hand are most of your common HTTP requests. The client asks for a resource, and gets it back. No prior connection setup is required, servers, networks, whatever can change between each request and everything will merrily chug along, which makes it much easier to scale.

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

#28

Post by shams93 »

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…

Then there's also online proctoring for test taking for universities as well where you need to stream live test takers to proctors.

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

#29

Post by jedberg »

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've always said AWS is the master of the 80% solution. They make a product that gets you most of the way there.

The reason they can get away with this is because your data is already at AWS. It's a lot easier to use a new service if the data you need is already there.

That's their advantage. That's where the real lock in comes from. Not from you using their services, but from you keeping your data there.

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

#30

Post by freehunter »

joecot wrote: post #4
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…

> I guess Twitch can stay in business for now. I assume you're being sarcastic/coy, but for those that might not know, Amazon owns Twitch. I'm guessing this service is them white labeling Twitch's tech infrastructure, and priced such that someone could not make a Twitch competitor with reasonable profit margins.

And they wonder why people complain about anti-trust.
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