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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

#51

Post by jorams »

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

It's important to note here that the 4 seconds of latency here is a pretty recent development. 30 seconds used te be the norm.

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

#52

Post by asutekku »

wrkronmiller wrote: post #16
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…

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?

That’s how it is handled in most universities in finland as far as i know. Lectures are just zoom meetings and everyone already knows how to use it.

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

#53

Post by PaulRobinson »

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…

Until 5 years ago I was CTO of a company called Livestation where we handled live streaming of about 40 news broadcasters including Al Jazeera, BBC World, CNN International, etc.

In my stint we dealt with the Egyptian and Turkish uprisings. The relevant diasporas were super keen to see what was going on in all those countries, and often the only places you could see them online was with us (we had raw feeds in a few places).

There is no way we would have paid $752/hour for 20,000 users for 10 hours. We would have dropped the bit rate way, way down (which is fine for most content), and we'd agreed pretty decent bandwidth rates all round.

Depending on context, 2 second latency might not be worth it either - spend less, get 10 second latency and use HLS using an off the shelf CDN, and you're going to pull the price down even further. When Akamai can offer you a better deal than this, you have to wonder how good a deal this is. :-)

We did end up using RTMP a lot for a P2P live streaming product, but that never took off, and eventually the company folded. Fun times, though.

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

#55

Post by sudhirj »

ponker wrote: post #40
mmcclure wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Stashing files–let's say that each file is one second long and is just numbered with the unix timestamp – makes things cost effective because now the server is just dropping files no 1,2,3,4... into a directory, and everyone is pulling them out in sequence the way an other file would be downloaded. This also allows exploiting the HTTP architecture – if you set the Cache-Control: public headers on the files (which you can do happily because they'll never change) they'll be cached at lots of places along the way, like CDNs, the local ISP, the office network, etc. HTTPS blew out most of these caching benefits, but at least the CDNs can cache the files at edges all over the world.

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

#56

Post by psds2 »

Terretta wrote: post #35

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 servic…

After you pointed this out I think I realized the target market - A tool to build a platform for the rising live stream direct sales model.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-viya-china-livestrea...

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

#57

Post by yomly »

shams93 wrote: post #28
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…

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

What? People go on camera to sit exams so they can be invigilated?

That's so short sighted. Anyone who wanted to cheat could do anything to circumvent that - first comes to mind is plastering the wall with notes...

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

#58

Post by atopuzov »

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…

Twitch is owned by Amazon.

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

#60

Post by imtringued »

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) ?

Because the protocol in question has support for caching through CDNs. If there are two viewers in the same city you can reduce your global bandwidth needs by half. There are alternatives like WebRTC that do not support caching and allow sub 1 second latency but they are also far more expensive.
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