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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

#31

Post by jkarneges »

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…

> but typically that involves stateful connections [...] and scaling to a large number of viewers can get extremely costly (and operationally difficult)

This is why we built Pushpin, to make it easier to handle stateful connections at scale. The project is mostly intended for moving application data, but it does work for media streaming too. See our live MP3 demo [1]. The backend runs GStreamer in a loop to produce the audio, and has no awareness of client connections. Pushpin moves the bytes and knows nothing about audio or codecs.

[1] http://audiostream.fanoutapp.com/

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

#32

Post by oldmanhorton »

freehunter wrote: post #30
joecot wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well, i don't think there are rules that they have to offer their proprietary tech at wholesale. I think it's a problem that Amazon is so massive as to own this tech at all, but once you have it, i would believe it's better to sell it for profit than to keep it locked up

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

#34

Post by mikeryan »

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…

Cloudflare does $1 per 1000 minutes viewed at that pricing they're only $12k. (plus storage - likely only a few bucks more)

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

#35

Post by Terretta »

Sometimes it seems things change quickly online, sometimes not so quickly.

It’s been about 20 years since we built “broadband activated merchandising” (aka “BAM”) for selling wrestling hats and t-shirts at scale to millions of viewers, contextually triggered along side WWE live event video streams:

A system and method for enhancing electronic commerce and/or communicating information concerning products and/or services in connection with multimedia (e.g., video) transmission and delivery is provided. The system and method facilitate targeted marketing and/or merchandising in connection with video streams delivered to users across a computer network, e.g., the Internet and/or the World Wide Web, by synchronizing ancillary content with the video stream. The method/system may be used in a broad range of applications for live, taped live and on-demand video streams.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20020019978A1/en

In your 640 or 800 px wide browser window, beside the live stream (320x240 at 700 kbps, ahem!), you had a product pane showing contextual offers you could add to your cart, and then check out when the event was over.

The stream metadata was fed by a producer watching the live action and using a e-commerce store event dashboard to choose what products to promote when.

For comparison, from this AWS article:

The team have added the ability to send timed metadata along with the video so that you can fire events in your application at crucial points in the live stream... you can build experiences that create a more valuable relationship with your viewers on your own websites and applications. For example, if you were live-streaming a product launch, you could synchronize additional product information to be displayed as new products appear in the video. You could even show a buy now button that allows viewers to purchase the exact product they are watching at that moment on the live-stream.

Pretty cool to see this descendant!

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

#36

Post by hardwaresofton »

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.

This seems to be a large part of the business model though. A platform play only needs to get you in the door and hooked on the almost-great bit of the platform you needed.

They win when the first comment in any technical-requirements-finding session is "well AWS has ... that could work?".

New companies choose AWS almost by default these days, and the alphabet soup of services available means that it's got an answer for just about any paradigm you're interested in, which means there's no reason to leave.

The proliferation of half-baked services at AWS will never end. They won't become fully baked either, because that doesn't make business sense -- doing just enough to capture new business is most efficient, and in the worst case just let some partner build on your platform and offer their services.

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

#37

Post by ALittleLight »

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 don't get how it can cost so much, and also how YouTube or Twitch would let you stream for free. They can't be making that much money off a stream, can they?

A 10 hour stream viewed by 20,000 people... My recollection of YouTube is that they pay the creator approximately a dollar per thousand views, if that's a third of what they make, then they make 3 dollars per thousand views. Assume YouTube counts a view as ten minutes, so 200k hours of streaming would be 1,200,000 views (200k hours to minutes / 10) would be (120*3) 3,600 dollars?

Something seems off by an order of magnitude. Is the markup that high? Did I make a calculating mistake?

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

#38

Post by hmmazoids »

ponker wrote: post #21
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.

Yup agreed -- looking at it from the lens of building a streaming website that scales to that many viewers per stream, it isn't going to be cheap (but cool it can handle it if you put the money in I guess).

I assume this is more targeted towards universities where they have a max of 300 students (at least that's what my university capped classes at) and they need something to get started quickly. At most they may stream for like 6 hours a day for each class. You don't even need good quality -- lowest tier quality (SD) ends up being

$2.00 per hour * 6 = $12 $0.0375 per hour * 6 * 500 = $67.50

Honestly ~$80-100 per day to stream to all your students? Still kinda expensive I guess but might be a small price to pay for a university if it means they can offer streaming education. Not to mention 99% of the time students don't even tune in and just watch the VOD.

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

#39

Post by johnbatch »

gundmc wrote: post #23
mabbo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 includ…

Microsoft has live events that support 10k participants: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-live-e...

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

#40

Post by ponker »

mmcclure wrote: post #27
ponker wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

Huh, thanks, I think I’m starting to get it. Is it that the connection-based model needs the data “copied” into each user’s stream on the server-side while the “stash the files in a bin” stateless model allows the networking hardware to cache this data somewhere in memory and just copy it on the fly onto different network links?
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