Introduction

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud-based storage and Media Services platform that helps indexing, packaging, storing and streaming video at scale. In VIDIZMO, this storage option offers Amazon S3 Standard and S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage classes for content storage, Amazon CloudFront for content delivery to users in geographically dispersed locations, and AWS Elemental MediaConvert to transcode content for multiscreen content delivery and seamless playback experience. 


AWS offers industry-leading scalability, content availability, performance, and security. This means customer organizations can use AWS to store and transcode any amount of media content in combination with VIDIZMO's out-of-the-box advanced content and user segregation capabilities, innovative video editing tools and support for industry-accepted security measures such as content encryption and DRM (Digital Rights Management). Amazon storage is designed for 99.999999999% of durability and trusted by 1 million+ Enterprise Customers around the world for storing data for their applications. AWS is also evaluated as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services for the tenth year in a row.


VIDIZMO uses AWS Media Services to process and deliver on-demand content in the cloud. When coupled with VIDIZMO, AWS Media Services helps you to:

  • Focus on creating and delivering innovative video experience and set aside concerns of acquiring and maintaining separate video encoding software
  • Efficiently use network resources to set up a robust content delivery network throughout the globe for optimal performance and low latency
  • Easily incorporate the power of machine learning to generate insights from video/audio using additional services such as Amazon Rekognition and Amazon Transcribe. Insights generated via Amazon's face-recognition and transcription engines include:
    • Faces detected in a video with names of famous celebrities
    • Synced closed captions for a video
    • Labels extracted from the objects detected within a video
    • Keywords extracted from instances of conversation and video highlights


To learn more about how to integrate AWS Insights with VIDIZMO portal, see: How to Configure AWS Video Indexer


Note: AWS Media Insights can also be configured with other storage providers in VIDIZMO.


How it Works


Why Amazon S3 Storage

Amazon S3 Storage is object storage that stores content in form of objects and a single object can be up to 5 terabytes in size (source). Object storage is a data storage architecture for handling large amounts of unstructured data. This includes videos, photos, documents, audio files, sensor data, and other types of media. Objects are discrete units of data that are stored in a structurally flat data environment. There are no folders, directories, or complex hierarchies as in a file-based system. Each object is a simple, self-contained repository that includes the data, metadata (descriptive information associated with an object), and a unique identifying number (instead of a file name and file path). This information enables VIDIZMO application to locate and access the object upon playback request.


Customers wanting to store their content 100% on-cloud with increased public outreach would opt for this storage, as it offers scalability and different redundancy strategies that replicate your content in primary or secondary regions, allowing content to be served even in the face of any failures.


Using AWS with VIDIZMO, you will gain full confidence and control for broadcasting your on-demand content with the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available today. As an AWS storage user, you will benefit from AWS data centers and a network architected to protect your information, identities, and application. With AWS, you can improve your ability to meet core security and compliance requirements, such as content protection and confidentiality with their comprehensive services and features.


Amazon S3 Standard

  • Amazon S3 Standard is general purpose storage for frequently accessed data
  • Supports low latency and high throughput performance
  • Designed for 99.99% availability over a given year.


Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering

  • Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering is designed to optimize costs by automatically moving data to the most cost-effective access tier, without performance impact or operational overhead.
  • Same low latency and high throughput performance of S3 Standard
  • Small monthly monitoring and auto-tiering fee
  • It is the ideal storage class for long-lived data with access patterns that are unknown or unpredictable
  • Designed for 99.9% availability over a given year


Why AWS Elemental MediaConvert

AWS Elemental MediaConvert is a file-based audio and video processing service that allows you to easily and reliably transcode on-demand content for multiscreen and broadcast delivery, when coupled with VIDIZMO. Below is list of a few advantages that you get with VIDIZMO and MediaConvert integration

  • Produce a wide range of professional media formats to produce enterprise-grade video outputs that look great on every  device with support of ultra-high definition resolutions and advanced audio features
  • With power of VIDIZMO's Setup Wizard, you may configure MediaConvert with AWS Storage in just a couple of minutes
  • Does not require any management or maintenance after configuration


AWS Elemental MediaConvert supports processing and transcoding of a variety of codecs and containers.


Configuration

You can configure AWS Storage and MediaConvert using VIDIZMO’s Setup Wizard which automates the process by directly interacting with your AWS Account, allowing you to set up your content storage through a series of easily configurable steps. 


You can also define a default Content Storage such that every Portal when created has default content storage settings. Read How to Update Storage and Transcoding Settings using Application Configuration Keys in VIDIZMO to know more. 


Setup Wizard has support for AWS Global as well as AWS Government Cloud, China Government Cloud. Furthermore, Setup Wizard can be executed at any point when you wish to change the configured storage or encoding options of your Portal. Read more at Understanding Setup Wizard.


Prerequisites

VIDIZMO uses the AWS SDK to connect your Portal with AWS to perform various some of them are:

  1. S3 bucket creation
  2. CDN creation
  3. Add, Update, delete Media in the S3 bucket
  4. Establishing a connection between S3 bucket and MediaConvert
  5. Create encoding Jobs 


The user whose credentials you use to configure your Amazon storage account and Amazon Elemental MediaConvert (Encoding Service) should have access to the permissions discussed above. For this, the best match of AWS managed permissions sets are discussed below.

  • AmazonS3FullAccess: This permission will help your VIDIZMO portal communicate with your AWS storage for accessing and creating required resources within your AWS account. It grants Read and Write permissions to objects in S3 bucket using AWS API, used by VIDIZMO.
  • CloudFrontFullAcess: Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service that delivers data, videos, applications to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds. This policy gives users unrestricted permission to perform any CloudFront action (creating new CDN and selecting CDN Price Class) on any resource (S3 bucket).
  • Media-Convert: To run transcoding jobs with AWS Elemental MediaConvert, first set up an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role to allow MediaConvert to access your input files in the Amazon storage and the locations where your output files are stored.


A detailed step-by-step guide to configure AWS Storage with MediaConvert is available here: How to Configure AWS Storage with AWS MediaConvert using Setup Wizard.


Executing Setup Wizard

VIDIZMO’s Setup Wizard provides an ease to its customers by automating the AWS Storage and MediaConvert configuration and the creation of required resources. If these resources already exist in your AWS Account, then VIDIZMO utilizes them without altering the existing content, otherwise, it creates new ones. 


Following steps are involved while executing Setup Wizard: 


1. AWS Storage Bucket creation as per your selected storage class.


Note: VIDIZMO Setup Wizard also gives you the flexibility of using pre-configured Amazon S3 Bucket. In this case, you will only have to enter the correct name of that bucket.


2. Creation of a CDN Profile and Endpoint against the Storage Account. 

3. A transcoding job is also created which converts an input file into a file or files.  Inputs and outputs can contain one or more of video, audio, and captions, either together or in separate files submitted from VIDIZMO Portal.

4. After creating the above-mentioned resources, Setup Wizard specifies the details of these resources in VIDIZMO so that your Portal is configured to use this content storage. 


Replication

Amazon's replication strategies allow content to be copied to multiple locations, providing access to content even in scenarios where it becomes unavailable due to any failure. Moreover, users can access content from geographically nearer locations, providing faster content delivery.


Replication options provided by Amazon for storage include:

  • Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR): With S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR), you can replicate objects (and their respective metadata and object tags) into other AWS Regions for reduced latency, compliance, security, disaster recovery, and so on and so forth. S3 CRR is configured to a source S3 bucket and replicates objects into a destination bucket in another AWS Region.
  • Amazon S3 Same-Region Replication (SRR): Amazon S3 SRR is an S3 feature that automatically replicates data between buckets within the same AWS Region. With SRR, you can set up replication at a bucket level, a shared prefix level, or an object level using S3 object tags. You can use SRR to make a second copy of your data in the same AWS Region. SRR helps you address data sovereignty and compliance requirements by keeping a copy of your data in a separate AWS account in the same region as the original. 


Read more at Amazon S3 Replication to know more about how Amazon S3 provides highly available deployments to protect your storage.


Limitations

In AWS Storage, the total volume of data and number of objects (videos, images, audio, document, etc) you can store are unlimited. Individual Amazon S3 objects can range in size from a minimum of 0 bytes to a maximum of 5 GB (AWS CLI). The largest object that can be uploaded in a single API PUT call is 5 TB. VIDIZMO achieves this maximum upload threshold using multipart upload API otherwise, only a single object of 160 GB can be uploaded using Amazon S3 console (source). 


Pricing

Amazon S3 Pricing

AWS offers its storage services on the basis of pay as you go. There is no minimum fee. You pay for storing objects in your S3 buckets. The rate you’re charged depends on

  • Your objects' size
  • How long you stored the objects during the month
  • The storage class—S3 Standard or S3 Intelligent-Tiering


To understand full pricing details see: Amazon S3 pricing


Media Convert Pricing

AWS Elemental MediaConvert offers you three modes of pricing, depending upon your workload and video transcoding.

  • On-demand pricing 
  • Reserved pricing
  • Combination of On-demand and Reserved pricing


To learn more visit: AWS Elemental MediaConvert Pricing