AWS MediaLive with Statmux Manages Quality, Performance, Bandwidth
Statistical Multiplexing (Statmux) is now available with AWS Elemental MediaLive. Statmux is a link-sharing process used in live broadcast workflows that allocates bits in real time between multiple live video channels, statistically according to demand. It adjusts the bitrate of each channel in the statmux pool on-the-fly to make the best use of total available bandwidth, and then combines the encoded outputs into a single transport stream.
The process increases network efficiency as far as possible by optimising picture quality for a group of channels, while staying within a fixed total bandwidth. Using AWS Elemental MediaLive with Statmux, distributors can now deploy linear video processing and playout in the AWS Cloud for broadcast, cable or terrestrial distribution.
Media companies such as national broadcasters originate live content and simultaneously share their content with distribution partners. Traditionally, this has been accomplished by preparing channels for distribution using purpose-built, on-premises hardware encoders. Producing, configuring and reliably operating dedicated encoding systems are time-consuming processes, requiring specific expertise, and the equipment usually cannot be re-purposed once deployed.
Instead, broadcasters and content providers can use AWS Elemental MediaLive with Statmux to build and manage broadcast video workflows on existing AWS hardware, as a service. This approach gives them more flexibility, reduces management costs and the amount hardware they need to maintain, and still delivers high picture quality with built-in reliability.
Video Quality
The main purpose of Statmux for MediaLive is to keep the video quality as high as possible while making the most effective use of your fixed satellite or cable distribution bandwidth. Within that scope, you can tune quality settings on a particular channel or channels with special requirements, without disrupting the others.
Resiliency is built into the system by automating resource allocation across a number of zones to increase availability, meanwhile managing resources for failover. Users can also monitor allocation - video metrics and multiplexer performance - with Amazon CloudWatch, which is integrated to allow real-time views of video metrics and multiplexer performance. The underlying infrastructure is monitored automatically for health, and when issues are detected they are resolved without disrupting the live channels.
Efficiency
Flexibility from working in the cloud is an advantage because users can add, remove or update live channels based on evolving audience and business needs, instead of on the limitations of their hardware. They can also introduce new codecs faster and more easily, prioritise resources per channel, and work with multiple codecs and resolutions. Broadcast distribution workloads can be built quite fast as well, without on-premises hardware, focussing on the efficiency of channel delivery over fixed network bandwidth.
For content providers that distribute traditional broadcast video as well as multiscreen linear video, Statmux for MediaLive can deliver both types through a single architecture. With the increasing importance of OTT delivery, which may have many different encoding requirements, having a unified headend to manage all encoding can make operations much simpler. aws.amazon.com
