AWS Elemental MediaConnect FAQs

AWS Elemental MediaConnect is a reliable, secure, and flexible transport service for live video. Using MediaConnect, you can build live video processing workflows and securely share content with your partners and customers, all using the AWS Cloud. MediaConnect takes your high-quality video from one source and sends it to one or more destinations. MediaConnect adds a quality-of-service layer over standard IP transport, enabling uninterrupted live video connections by using packet recovery, and it supports industry-standard video encryption. By using the video replication feature, you can distribute your streams to multiple workflows within your own account or share your content with other AWS accounts. MediaConnect gives you visibility into your live video’s operational performance with real-time statistics and alerts. MediaConnect can be deployed in minutes, and is integrated with other AWS services such as AWS Elemental MediaLive. 

To use MediaConnect, you start by creating a flow using either the MediaConnect console or the MediaConnect API. A flow logically connects one video source with many destinations. You specify three details about your flow: 1) the transport protocol to use, 2) the type of encryption, and 3) the destinations. MediaConnect returns an ingest endpoint where you can send your live video as a single unicast transport stream. MediaConnect then replicates and distributes the stream to every destination specified, whether inside or outside AWS.

MediaConnect is designed for video broadcasters, content owners, and content aggregators who expect a professional-grade solution that encompasses high quality of service, strong encryption, flexible routing, monitoring, and sharing capabilities. Before MediaConnect, customers found it difficult to send high-quality video to the cloud due to concerns about reliability, security, and cost. With MediaConnect, content producers can send high-quality video feeds to AWS without sacrificing reliability or security, while also reducing costs and improving agility compared to satellite and fiber. MediaConnect also provides video distributors with a reliable way to receive live video in the AWS Cloud. MediaConnect can be used with either AWS Direct Connect or transmission over the public internet. 

Satellite and fiber solutions have long lead times, limited agility, require up-front commitments, and lack the scale to meet demand as workloads change over time. MediaConnect is a pay-as-you-go service with predictable costs and you can get started in minutes, not months. With MediaConnect, it’s simple to build end-to-end workflows using other AWS services, and you benefit from integrated billing, monitoring, and support. In addition, MediaConnect provides the flexibility to start, stop, and change your configurations on demand. 

MediaConnect has advantages over other existing solutions to improve IP transport quality of service because it performs better over long distances, supports multiple protocols, offers both contribution and business-to-business distribution (on-premises-to-cloud, cloud-to-cloud, and cloud-to-on-premises) workflows, and doesn’t require you to build your own solutions to enable security or sharing.

MediaConnect can function as a standalone service or within a larger video workflow that includes other AWS services such as AWS Media Services. AWS Media Services is a family of services that form the foundation of cloud-based workflows. They offer the capabilities that you need to create, package, and deliver live or on-demand video to consumers around the world, all accessible through the AWS Management Console and APIs.

MediaConnect lets you select from several video-specific, network-level protocols to maintain video quality. These protocols send additional information over the network so that packet loss doesn’t impact live video quality. Specifically, MediaConnect supports both an open standard (the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers SMPTE-2022 Part 1 standard for Forward Error Correction for Real-Time Video/Audio Transport Over IP Networks), and a commercial protocol (Zixi), that is commonly used by broadcasters. MediaConnect also manages all the infrastructure for you, and recovers from any issues automatically.

MediaConnect gives you the option to apply encryption to your video workflows. It supports trusted security methodologies like AES and Zixi encryption and decryption. Each output can be encrypted with a unique key as it leaves MediaConnect, giving you control over your content’s security. MediaConnect also lets you securely share your content with your customers and partners using entitlements which grant access to your video content.

MediaConnect gives you metrics on both the health of the network carrying your video and the health of your video streams. On the network side, MediaConnect provides packet loss metrics that quantify the end-to-end network performance. MediaConnect will suggest when network conditions indicate that you might want to reduce the bitrate of the input stream to get a higher quality of service, or adjust the dimensions of the error correction parameter at the source of your video flow. Additional alarms (using the TR-101 290 broadcast standard) identify issues with the transport stream timing going across the network end-to-end. This tells you when you might want to investigate settings on your source encoder or network and adjust them to maximize quality.

AWS Elemental MediaConnect is a reliable, secure, and flexible transport service for live video that enables broadcasters and content owners to cost-effectively build video workflows and securely share live content with partners and customers. Whether you manage live 24x7 channels, stream live events, or need disaster recovery capabilities, MediaConnect gives you the tools to build your applications in the AWS Cloud.

AWS Ground Station enables you to control and ingest data from orbiting satellites without having to buy or build satellite ground station infrastructure. AWS Ground Station does this by integrating the ground station equipment like antennas, digitizers, and modems into our AWS Regions around the world. It’s as easy as onboarding your satellites and scheduling time to communicate with them. You have the option of conducting all of your satellite operations on the AWS Cloud, including the storing and processing of your satellite data and delivering your products using AWS services, or use AWS Ground Station just to downlink your satellite data and transport it to your own processing center.

Contribution video is lightly compressed, high-quality video, often referred to as mezzanine video, originating from a contribution encoder or playout system. MediaConnect supports transport stream flows using the AVC (Advanced Video Codec) and HEVC (High Efficiency Video Codec) compression formats, and bitrates exceeding 120 Mbps (megabits per second). In addition, MediaConnect supports AWS CDI flows with JPEG XS for perceptually-lossless contribution, and bitrates ranging from 140 to 2500 Mbps or more using AWS Direct Connect.

MediaConnect ingests content from on-premises locations or from the cloud. For live video sources that originate on-premises, a video encoder such as AWS Elemental Live is required to create the contribution video. AWS Elemental Live seamlessly integrates with MediaConnect. You simply provide the MediaConnect flow ARN (Amazon Resource Name) as the output destination in Elemental Live to contribute live video. MediaConnect outputs can also be sent to on-premises encoders by supplying a MediaConnect output ARN to Elemental Live to receive a video source on-premises.

MediaConnect is compatible with any contribution encoder that uses SMPTE 2110 protocol and the SMPTE 2110-22 JPEG XS compression standard, including AWS Elemental Live appliance and software. Contact us if you are interested in purchasing AWS Elemental Live or for answers about compatibility with other JPEG XS encoders and decoders.

With a suitable JPEG XS contribution encoder, you can achieve live video latencies of 50 ms between on-premises and the AWS Cloud. This includes JPEG XS encoding at one end and decoding to uncompressed video (SMPTE 2110 or AWS CDI) at the other end.

You control the JPEG XS compression ratio directly influencing the bandwidth required. For HD video, between 140 and 320 Mbps (megabits per second) is typical while for UHD video, bandwidth generally ranges between 1250 and 2500 Mbps. With MediaConnect and JPEG XS, you use AWS Direct Connect to bridge your on-premises video networks to your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) VPCs. Direct Connect is a cloud service solution that makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS, with dedicated connections using a 1, 10, or 100 Gbps Ethernet port. A single Direct Connect link can support many HD channels, and you can provision multiple Direct Connect links to create redundant connections for critical workloads.