AWS Elemental at 10: A Steady Stream of Cloud-based Video Processing Innovation for Live Sports

AWS Elemental's cloud-based tech can now be seen at F1 races, Wimbledon matches, and Super Bowls

On September 3, 2015, Amazon Web Services (AWS) paid a reported $500 million to acquire one of its go-to media technology vendors, Portland, Ore.-based startup Elemental Technologies, a company recognized as a pioneer for a number of software-based solutions for multiscreen content delivery.

At the time, AWS, already recognized as a pioneering cloud-computing services division, was under the direction of Andy Jassy, who has served as CEO of the broader Amazon Inc. since 2021. Total revenue for the AWS division was $7.88 billion for 2015. While known as a rapidly developing sector with plenty of business interest attached to it, live sports streaming was a nascent — technologically fraught — endeavor at the time.

Formula 1 built its F1 TV Premium streaming service using AWS Elemental Media Services. Fans can watch every F1 Grand Prix, Sprint and qualifier and practice session in live 4K and using myriad camera angles

Jump forward 10 years to present day. AWS is not only the leading global provider of cloud computing services, but it’s also a leader in media services, touting clients ranging from Netflix to NASCAR. The division generated nearly $31 billion just in the second quarter of this year alone.

And live sports streaming is now ubiquitous and of reliable quality, with AWS Elemental having developed over this decade-long span myriad pioneering tools and services fueling the craft’s rapid evolution. You can draw a straight line of AWS Elemental’s product innovation right to the point at which client Tubi was somehow able to concurrently stream live video of Super Bowl LIX last February to an almost unthinkably huge audience of 15.5 million viewers with nary a bug.

Samira Panah Bakhtiar, GM of media, entertainment, sports and games at AWS isn’t necessarily bragging when she says that video streaming “wouldn’t have advanced to the point where it has” without the AWS Elemental’s sustained pace of streaming technology innovation.

“The Amazon acquisition was, above all, a huge validation of the work the Elemental team had put in to become the most trusted and recognized brand in the industry,” said Jesse Rosenzweig, who co-founded Elemental in 2006 along with fellow video engineers Brian Lewis and the late Sam Blackman.

A New Kind of Media Services 

Elemental developed software that harnessed graphics processing units GPUs for high-speed video encoding, decoding, and transcoding on standard hardware. Elemental’s solutions made it possible to deliver live and on-demand video to a wide range of devices, including computers, tablets and smartphones. The company’s “Elemental Live” platform encoded video and audio for live streaming applications, supporting adaptive bitrate protocols and multiple high-definition streams.

Meanwhile, Its “Elemental Server” was an enterprise-class system for batch transcoding. It offered faster-than-real-time transcoding by using multiple GPUs, allowing for the conversion of on-demand content for various platforms.

AWS would take all of this innovative acumen, transition it to the cloud, and form AWS Media Services. By 2017, the group announced five services that would enable video offerings to be created in the cloud at scale:

• AWS Elemental MediaConvert:transcodes file-based video content.
• AWS Elemental MediaLive:encodes live video for televisions or connected devices.
• AWS Elemental MediaPackage:prepares and secures live video streams for delivery to connected devices.
• AWS Elemental MediaStore:delivers video from media-optimized storage.
• AWS Elemental MediaTailor:inserts targeted advertising into streaming video.

AWS Elemental MediaConnect, which offers a transport stream based video contribution and distribution, was added a bit later

As a proof of concept in 2017, AWS Media Services famously worked with NASA to live-stream 4K video from 250 miles above the Earth’s atmosphere, from the International Space Station, to viewers attending NAB in Las Vegas.

The feat was recognized by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a technical-innovation HPA Award and, in the words of Bakhtiar, “invigorated” what the video industry now thought was possible to achieve with live streaming.

Just in the area of sports alone, a steady progression of landmark achievements followed for AWS clients including BBC, Formula 1, FOX, NBCUniversal, Netflix, PBS, Peacock, Tubi and Warner Bros. Discovery, just to name a few.

• BBC delivered live, 4K/UHD coverage of both Wimbledon and European Championship soccer, including the 2020 UEFA Euro final, which was watched by 25 million viewers using AWS Elemental Live.
• Formula 1 built its F1 TV Premium streaming service using AWS Elemental Media Services. Fans can watch every F1 Grand Prix, Sprint and qualifier and practice session in live 4K and using myriad camera angles.
• Fox deployed AWS Elemental MediaLive to deliver a record-sized number of concurrent Super Bowl streams to Tubi viewers while maintaining super-low latency.
• NBCUniversal delivered 23.5 billion minutes of streaming video for the 2024 Paris Olympics with personalized ads inserted by MediaTailor
• Netflix powers its live event streaming with AWS Elemental MediaConnect and MediaLive to deliver optimized experiences to subscribers.

“When we began thinking through our approach for live three years ago, great quality on as many devices as possible, without interruptions, was at the center of the viewing experience we wanted to create for our members,” said Flavio Ribeiro, Netflix’s senior engineering manager, live encoding technologies. “Our cloud-based approach for live encoding allowed for dynamic scaling, flexibility, and ease of integration across a range of Live events. We created our solution using AWS Elemental MediaConnect to acquire feeds in the cloud and AWS Elemental MediaLive to transcode them into various video quality levels, and we’re energized by the progress we’ve made in building an experience millions of viewers enjoy.”