Learn how the BBC and Nine Network have enhanced the user experience and created new business models and opportunities, giving audiences more choices with more features, all while maintaining broadcast-grade service. When your business is providing live content to viewers, you know that there are no second chances. Audiences have come to expect a faultless live broadcast, and providers know they must ensure reliability with failover and redundancy plans. Learn how migrating to the cloud offers a new way to architect live-streaming workflows while maintaining the highest standards of resilience.

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Building and Moving Live
Broadcasting to AWS
Kunaal Ramchandani
Digital Development Director
Nine Entertainment Co.
C T D 3 0 5
Mike Callahan
Sr. Director Solutions Marketing
Amazon Web Services
Lloyd Wallis
Senior Engineer
The British Broadcasting
Corporation

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Traditional industry chain is rigid & yet fragile

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The industry is reorienting around the viewercloud reconnects you with your audience
Shift
Mobility Personal
ReliableQuality
Quality
Reliability Scalability
Agility Resiliency

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N i n e

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N i n e

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Live streams 2016–2018
Live stream uptake

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Legacy live streaming workflow
Teradek
Encoder
Player
RTSP HLSHD-SDI
News Room Data Center
Teradek
Decoder
Tricaster
Spinnaker
Encoder
CDN
Team
Viewer
RDP
HLSSDISDI
User

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Behind the scenes, things weren’t as rosy
A and B
are not responsive
Issues with Decoder 1 Live streaming issue—
A is down
A "Camera 2" black
screen
Recurring livestream
issues (legacy)
Tour Down Under
livestream issue
B livestream failing
And on and on and on …

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Have you tried
turning it off and on
again?

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AWS to the rescue

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New live streaming workflow
Wirecast Player
RTMP HLS HLS HLSHD-SDI
AWS CloudNews Room
User

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CF Template
New live streaming pipeline
TeamCity
AWS CloudDev
User
Stash
API API
CI/CD
Code
Commit

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Everything is
awesome!

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Much better!
1784
Playback success Startup time Smoothness Video quality Cost!
94 12
87
95
84
98

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What happened?
 2011 – The move (BBC Sport)
 2012 – The Olympics
 2013 – The iPlayer VOD refresh
 2014 – The iPlayer Live refresh
 2019 – Where next?

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Our live streaming outputs
 33 Simulcast TV stations
 4 Major news event pop-up services
 2 UHD services
 60+ Pop-up video event streams
 166 Simulcast radio stations
 50 Pop-up radio services

26. 3.6 million hours of live content
delivered to users in a day
Sweden vs. England – 7th July 2018

27. A peak of over 5.5 terabits per second
... and we wanted to do more

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More than just encoding and packaging
Customer
NOC Operator
Gallery
Operator
Encoding and
Packaging
Event Control HA, Routing, and
Monitoring
Content Delivery
Networks
Real User Monitoring
(RUM)
Playback
Mediation

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Breaking down the problem
 A stream is made up of one or more independent flows
 Each flow can go through several components
 On-premise to cloud gateway
 Audio encoder
 Video encoder
 Packager
 CDN origin
 We need observability of all of these

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Simulcast Console

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”status-poller-*”
 Each managed product we use gets a ‘Status Poller’
 An Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group (ASG) polls APIs every 30 seconds
 Generates a ‘state’ document
 Samples topic goes to a Splunk archive
 Firehose topic goes to Simulcast Console

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Status Poller architecture
AWS Elemental poller
Packager poller
…
poller
Splunk
Simulcast ConsoleFirehose topic
Sample topic
NOC Operator

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Example status message
<property name="deployment_id">LiveModavHlsrtpWhite</property>
<property name="asg_id">ExampleAutoScalingGroup</property>
<property name="channel_id">bbc_radio_somerset_sound</property>
<property name="manifest_url">https://example.bbc.co.uk/somerset.m3u8</property>
<property name="rtp_uri">rtp://1.2.3.4:9999</property>
<property name="rtp_protocol">tcp</property>
<property name="input_sid">bbc_radio_somerset_sound</property>
<property name="leg_id">A</property>
<property name="last_manifest_polled">1542634646839</property>
<property name="last_rtp_sent">1542634647336</property>
<property name="last_starttime_found">1542634644</property>
<property name="last_endtime_rtp_sent">1542634646</property>
<property name="rtp_latency_threshold_millis">2000</property>
<property name="avg_rtp_latency">456</property>
<property name="avg_manifest_fetch_latency">20</property>

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Lifecycle of a Marvin event
Scheduled
Output
allocated
‘Coming up’
loop
Live output
‘Closedown’
loop
Output
stopped
On demands
generated
Output
released

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Marvin: Live encoder/event manager
 We maintain two sets of state per encoder
 Actual state
 Target state
 Encoder manager is a finite state machine (FSM) that knows how to
transition from current to target state

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Marvin architecture
Marvin UI Target State
Actual State
Encoder Locks
AWS Elemental
Status-Poller
Encoder Manager
AWS
Elemental
Live

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What can improve?
 Challenges for next generation operations
 Currently human-intervention focused
 Automatic response needed for reliability goals
 Challenges next generations live streaming platform
 Currently a fixed pool of encoders & packagers
 Create and destroy event resources per-event
 AWS Elemental Media Services looks increasingly promising
 Initial launch for AWS Elemental MediaLive didn’t have the feature set we needed
 Features added in 2018 make it viable
 Image insertion, synchronized pipelines, input switching

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How you can build with AWS Media Services
Live streaming using AWS Elemental MediaLive and
AWS Elemental MediaPackage
AWS Region
AWS Elemental
MediaLive
Live Video
Processing
AWS Elemental
MediaPackage
Origination and
JIT Packaging
Amazon
CloudFront
Content Delivery Network
AWS Elemental
Live
AWS Elemental
Live

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AWS Elemental MediaLive: Enabling broadcast workflows
Auto Scaling groups
Input A
Input B
Pipeline A
Pipeline B
Destination A
Destination B
Availability zone
Region
Synchronized
Live Channel Configuration
• Insert ad markers (SCTE-35)
• Add and remove graphic overlays
• Switch a live input between sources
• Enables playlist capabilities
• Duplicate outputs synchronized across availability zones
• Enables seamless failover between channel pipelines

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AWS Elemental MediaPackage: More than just a
packaging and origin instance
Auto Scaling groups
Ingest A
Ingest B Ingest Packaging, Egress, and Cache
• Streaming distribution
endpoints
Automaticfailover
betweenredundantinputs
Storage and
Database
Availability zone
Region • Auto-scaling fleet for packaging and egress resources for highly
available origination
• Built-in origin shield and cache for reliable performance
• Automatic failover between redundant inputs for consistent channel
output to CDN
• Highly available live channel output simplifies player development and
provides more reliable user experience for viewers

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Even easier to get started using the “Live Streaming on AWS” solution
Features
• Support for RTP, RTMP, and HLS inputs
• Dual input and built-in redundancy
• Multiple variable bitrate outputs from 1080p through 270p
• HLS, DASH, and MSS outputs
• Leverages the highly available and scalable
features of AWS Elemental MediaLive and AWD Elemental
MediaPackage
• Leverages Amazon CloudFront for global distribution
• Automated deployment through CloudFormation and AWS Lambda
Live Channel Source Multiple OTT Devices
Just-in-Time package of the
MediaLive output into HLS,
DASH and MSS
Global Distribution for the
HLS, DASH and MSS
versions of the live stream
Playback for the live stream
supported on multiple devices
Ingest the live feed and transcodes
into multiple bitrate HLS
Dual Ingest Support
Amazon
S3
Demo HLS
Source Stream
Amazon
S3
Demo Player
Preview
Amazon
CloudFront
Content Delivery
Network
AWS Elemental
MediaLive
Live Video
Processing
AWS Elemental
MediaPackage
Origination and
JIT Packaging

46. Thank you!
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