Definitions

Streaming media is the delivery of audio and video data in the form of small fragments files over a network — typically the internet. As an alternative to a file download, streaming has emerged as the most common method of delivering media to audiences as it optimizes both network bandwidth and local device storage. Common applications of streaming media include:

You need a considerable amount of infrastructure to process and deliver content to an audience. To cope with unpredictable spikes in demand, such as a live large sporting event, content gone viral, or the acquisition of an asset library, organizations have become accustomed to purchasing more hardware than necessary. These investments strand capital in underutilized infrastructure that could instead be used to develop new features or create new content.

AWS helps customers avoid these large capital expenditures by providing pay-as-you-go resources for streaming media. When you use AWS Media Services, you pay for only the minutes of content processed or the bytes delivered. As your audience grows, you can quickly scale out ingest, processing, origination, and delivery components near viewers to improve quality of service with an expanding global footprint of AWS geographic Regions and hundreds of points-of-presence connected with a fully redundant, high throughput network backbone.

AWS provides over 200 cloud infrastructure services and a network of thousands of AWS Partners to power your streaming media experiences. In this section, we define two conceptual layers and several components that you will find in any streaming media workload regardless of specific implementation. The examples throughout this paper feature AWS Media Services, but the concepts should apply to any streaming media workload.

Streaming media conceptual components