[AWS LA Media & Entertainment Event 2015]: Raising the Bar on Video Streaming Quality with AWS

Raising the Bar on Video Streaming

Quality by Utilizing AWS

Amazon Video Case Study

Alex Dunlap, GM CloudFront

© 2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved©

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High Reliability =

No re-buffering

Low Reliability =

Frequent re-buffering

Why is QoS so important to the business?

What to Expect from the Session

Learn what video quality means and how it’s measured

Understand how Amazon Video ensures customers get

the best possible video quality

See how AWS helps Amazon Video achieve their goals

How Thinking is Changing

Traditional media workflows revolved around

components

Building workflows in the cloud means focusing

on functions that matter to customers.

OTT delivery functions

Ingest TranscodePublish /

StoreDeliver Analyze

Mezzanine Files

Contribution Feeds

Multi Protocol

Single Codec

Integration

Media Fragments

Manifests

Players

Derivatives

Recordings

Cache

Usage Analytics

Security Feedback

Prepare Assets for Multiscreen Deliver Assets and Measure

Quality: What is it?

Different use cases make different trade-offs

ErrorsAverage bit

rate

RebuffersTime to

first frame

Combine multiple sources of data to get a full

picture

Origin CDN Players / Devices

• 4xx errors

• 5xx errors

• Requests per

minute

• Cache hit/miss

• Network

congestion (to

origin and to

player)

• Rebuffer events

• Fatal error events

• Average bitrate

• Time to first frame

CASE STUDY:

AV: Overview

Amazon Video: watch

anytime, anywhere

Amazon:

a brand that

customers

trust

Subscription

service plus

buy or rent

Exclusive

& Original

content

Premium video: the core of

what we’re offering

AV: Overview

Tradeoffs

become

important



AV: Overview

Tradeoffs

become

important

Reliability

Playback

start time

Video

quality

Priority of Tradeoffs

We invent new technologies to

push the boundary where these

tradeoffs must be made.

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AV: Overview

Tradeoffs

become

important

Measuring

& improving

playback



AV: Overview

Tradeoffs

become

important

Measuring

& improving

playback

Customer

trust



AV: Overview

Tradeoffs

become

important

Measuring

& improving

playback

Customer

trust

We noticed that you experienced

poor video playback while

watching the following rental on

Amazon Video: Casablanca.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience

and have issued you a refund for

the following amount: $2.99. We

hope to see you again soon.

Premium video: delivering

reliably at scale

Scale & Complexity

# of devices

500+

Scale & Complexity

# of end-user networks

23,000+

Scale & Complexity

# of titles

600,000+

Scale & Complexity

# of encodes

5,400,000+

Scale & Complexity

# of fragments

50,000,000,000

Scale & Complexity

Challenges

Key challenge:Deliver premium video reliably over an inherently unreliable

network to hundreds of devices at various specs

Challenges

2009: The early days

Lack of

customer

metrics with

quantifiable

business

impact

Basic

handling of

degradation

and failure

scenarios

Many

devices,

each

worked

differently

Challenges

2009: The early days

Poor insight

into network

congestion

Low CDN cache

hit ratios

No feedback

loop

Solutions

Solutions

Measure1 2 3Evaluate Act

Closing the Feedback Loop

Measuring the

customer experience

Different devices,

different

implementations,

no simple plugin

Solutions

Solutions

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High Reliability =

No re-buffering

Low Reliability =

Frequent re-buffering

Solutions

Improving the video player

Concurrent

downloads

to maximize

throughput

Adaptive

playback

CDN

switching

DNS failure

Client knows

to fall back to

other CDNs

Solutions

CDN Balancer

Automatic

prioritization

of traffic to

CDNs based

on playback

performance

Understand

performance

by streaming

protocol,

device, end-

user network,

geography,

and CDN

Observe recent

performance to

ensure a problem

experienced by

one customer is a

problem avoided

by others

Solutions

Then > Now

Reduced the percent of

streams with playback

defects by 87% while traffic

has grown by 270x

Results:

2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

Am

azo

n V

ideo

Cu

sto

mers

Web Services (Purchasing, Catalog,

Vending, etc.)

Content Delivery

Telemetry Storage

Video Transcoding

using AWS

Content Origin

Storage

Amazon Video

Japan

Prime Video

Austria

Amazon Originals

Amazon S3

Amazon RedshiftAmazon EC2

Amazon SWFAmazon EC2

Prime Video

Japan

Prime Video

UK & Germany

CloudFront

Then > Now

Improving CloudFront’s Media

Delivery Capabilities

AV’s Long Tail Demand Profile Presents a Challenge to

CDNs

More Popular Titles Less Popular Titles

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Other CDNs

Why doesn’t the traditional CDN work for long tail media?

Limited storage

at the edge

Least recently

used eviction

policy

Media files are big

and getting bigger

Objects requested frequently

High cache hit ratios

Good playback experience

Objects requested infrequently

High cache miss ratios

Poor playback experience (latency, rebuffers)

Solution: Build Infrastructure Optimized for

Throughput and Storage

Interconnect

Fabric

Tier 1:

Transit Layer

Tier 2:

Caching Layer

Border

Transit / Peers

Interconnect

Fabric

Border

Transit / Peers

Large-

Object Store

Large-

Object Store

Large-

Object Store

Backbone

Benefits

Benefits

Direct peering

with major ISPs in

multiple internet

exchange

facilities

Improved

ThroughputBetter Caching Lower Costs

Petabytes of content

storage at the edge

Decouples storage

from network

capacity; scale each

separately as

demand warrants

Our relationship with AV also influenced other media

streaming specific improvements to CloudFrontIntelligent Pre-fetching

5 Mbps

2.5 Mbps

1 Mbps

512 Kbps

256 Kbps

Dynamic Manifest Support

CloudFront

Edge

Pre-fetch video fragments into cache at

the requested and adjacent bitrates to

reduce cache misses.

AV URL Vending

Service

Dynamic Manifest

Service

Media FragmentsMedia

Fragments

Built support for requesting a dynamically

generated manifest to optimize bitrate

availability based on device to improve

quality of playback.

.m3u8

Results: CloudFront winning traffic where we have

deployed new sites and raising the bar on quality

CloudFront Traffic GrowthCloudFront QoS Improvements

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Peak T

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Peak Throughput of Amazon Video served via CloudFront

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Quality of Service of Amazon Video served via CloudFront

Results: Dramatically improve performance on long tail

portion of content

More Popular Titles Less Popular Titles

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CloudFront Other CDNs

Thank You!

[AWS LA Media & Entertainment Event 2015]: Raising the Bar on Video Streaming Quality with AWS

Technology

Transcript of [AWS LA Media & Entertainment Event 2015]: Raising the Bar on Video Streaming Quality with AWS