AWS Elemental reflects on 10 years of cloud-powered breakthroughs

To mark AWS’s 10-year anniversary of acquiring Elemental Technologies, Shaun Lim of APB+ spoke with Greg Truax, Director of Live Services, AWS Elemental, who reflected on the breakthroughs that reshaped video streaming — from cloud-native media services and Emmy-winning encoding to AI-driven innovation and global scale.

Looking back at the past decade, which milestone or breakthrough do you feel had the biggest impact on the evolution of video streaming, and why?

Truax: AWS Elemental was able to take their hardware appliance and software applications and build and launch multiple fully-managed, pay-as-you-go services just two years after acquisition; this made a huge impact on the evolution of video streaming. The purpose-built AWS Elemental Media Services launched in 2017 and 2018 started a wave of migration to the cloud, helping fuel rapid growth in D2C services. 

In 2020, AWS Elemental won the Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for Quality-Defined Variable Bitrate (QVBR). This feature alone helps customers save up to 50% on storage and distribution costs and increase video quality for live and on-demand video encoding. More recently, Media Quality-Aware Resiliency (MQAR), an integrated capability between AWS Elemental Media Services and Amazon CloudFront, provides cross-region origin failover in seconds based on video quality, to deliver high-quality live video without interruption. 

AWS Elemental has continuously innovated on behalf of our customers of all sizes, from small video catalogue conversions and streaming to hundreds or thousands of viewers, to scaling with the world’s largest broadcasters and direct-to-consumer streaming providers. These include platforms with massive catalogues and audiences in the tens of millions, such as PBS, Formula 1, NBCUniversal’s Peacock, Prime Video, and Netflix.

As media workflows shift further to the cloud and AI becomes embedded in video processing, how is AWS Elemental preparing for the next decade of innovation?

Truax: Gen AI is obviously a major trend across all industries, and AWS Elemental works with customers to deploy solutions that extract additional insights about content and create new viewer experiences. Customers are evaluating generative AI solutions to reduce costs, enhance audience engagement, increase global reach, and drive revenue growth through capabilities such as workflow automation, content localisation, immersive experiences, and monetisation of media archives. 

AWS Elemental can help customers navigate these changes while building sustainable, profitable operations. Content owners also constantly evaluate new ways to monetise their content, increase revenue, lower acquisition costs, and retain viewers. With AWS Elemental MediaTailor, which at its core is a revenue generation service, we’ll continue to track the ways in which customers can experiment with different subscription models and ad types, striking the right balance between viewer satisfaction with profitability.

How can AWS Elemental continue to support the evolution of the broadcast and media industry in APAC, given the region’s unique challenges and opportunities?

Truax: The media industry in APAC is interesting and diverse. Local AWS Elemental teams and AWS Partners work with customers throughout the region to understand requirements, specifications, and connectivity needs. We augment our in-region teams with our global resources and frequently arrange roadshows and meetings for service leaders and execs to hear directly from customers. 

AWS Elemental MediaLive Anywhere is a good example of building AWS services to meet varied customer workloads in APAC, with its competitive pricing and support for hybrid cloud and on-premises workloads. This is important to consider as many solutions are still deployed on premises. MediaConnect has also had strong adoption by broadcasters in the region, and we will continue to develop features that help transition more live video transport to the cloud.