AWS for M&E Blog

re:Invent bonus content: M&E-focused sessions on-demand

The following are sessions from the final week of re:Invent 2020 that we think M&E Attendees will appreciate. Click the links provided under the session to watch them on-demand. For all of the details on re:Invent, check out the Media & Entertainment attendee guide to AWS re:Invent 2020 post. Here are the sessions from week 1, week 2 and week 3 we recommend, all available on-demand.

Distributed machine learning for digital and TV ad serving

In this session for technology leaders, data scientists, and machine learning (ML) engineers, discover how Comcast FreeWheel analyzes billions of ad serving records with AWS to predict advertising inventory for digital and linear TV. Join this session for an insider view of FreeWheel’s cloud-based ML pipeline for ad inventory that handles long-range time-stream data across audience segments, geographies, and media, and see how FreeWheel built an end-to-end training pipeline cost-effectively with AWS. Take away best practices on cloud services, compute optimization, pitfalls to avoid, challenges common to inventory prediction. Also, learn about the unique ML solutions FreeWheel developed to solve them.

Live content production on the AWS Cloud 

The cloud is liberating broadcasters, sports federations, and OTT companies from onerous and inflexible capex models while maintaining reliable operations. AWS allows media organizations to scale up live production operations for major events and scale down during off-seasons or production hiatuses. Live production in the cloud also allows for new forms of innovation by decoupling product and content features from hardware refresh lifecycles. Learn how broadcast solutions provider Grass Valley uses the AWS Cloud to enable live productions of almost any scale, complexity, and genre at the touch of a button. Also hear how AWS is developing new technologies to enable live video operations in the cloud.

Innovate, enhance, and secure OTT and B2B video delivery

The world of content contribution and distribution is changing, and AWS is helping people solve the latest challenges. Whether the use case is one-to-many or many-to-one, AWS provides solutions custom built for media content. This session explores two use cases, one highlighting multisite contribution feeding centralized distribution and another focused on highly secure centralized contribution to multiple sites. Learn how the ease, flexibility, scalability, and security of AWS enables advancements for modern content contribution and distribution.

How Sony Interactive Entertainment renders with AWS

Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) Worldwide Studios is a diverse network of highly successful and passionate game development studios and support functions, responsible for creating some of the world’s most well-known PlayStation games. In this session, SIE Cloud Infrastructure Project Manager Asghar Nisar and Engineer Andy Taylor share how SIE is modernizing its existing infrastructure to remotely render visual images and effects using AWS. See how AWS Thinkbox Deadline Amazon EC2 G4 and P3dn graphics instances can be used to assist artists in spending more time iterating on creative work rather than waiting for rendering workloads to complete.

Empowering users with natural language search

Content creators face the ever-increasing challenge of cataloging content in a way that is easily accessible by users. Providing content relevant to a user’s search from vast archives of content requires a system that automatically provides the best match from the most relevant content. Using the Amazon Kendra machine learning service, the Wall Street Journal created Talk2020, a tool that allows users to query thousands of transcripts from speeches and media appearances with natural language searches. Learn the challenges the team overcame and how working with AWS enabled them to offer an innovative, easy-to-use customer experience that was previously not possible.

How Disney+ deploys globally with Amazon ECS

Hear how Disney+ empowered developers to scale globally using Amazon ECS to bring you your favorite Disney classics and brand new originals. This session covers the best practices that Disney+ uses to empower developers to build applications with minimal infrastructure toil. See how you can use Amazon ECS at massive production scale to make your developers’ workflow simpler so that all they need to worry about is where to push the code. Finally, get a brief look at an abstraction layer on top of Amazon ECS that combines ALB, cluster scaling, application scaling, and robust health checking to enable simple and safe deployments.

Which episode? Using AI to streamline media content operations

Reviewing, searching, and analyzing image and video content at scale remains a top challenge for organizations in media and entertainment. In this session, dive into the most common problems facing these organizations, from enhancing the viewer experience by streamlining operational and compliance media tasks, to more effectively monetizing content and optimizing content archives. Learn how companies are using Amazon Rekognition and Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels to build features such as deep content search, content monetization through sponsorship analysis, brand safety checks, and automated ad insertion to get more out of their content archives.

Accelerating next-generation direct-to-consumer experiences

To captivate audiences, media enterprises have to remain nimble in the face of change to deliver innovative experiences that leverage their unique content libraries and technology assets. In this session, learn how NBCUniversal worked with AWS to design, implement, operate, and accelerate the launch of its successful Peacock streaming service.

FOX: Uncompressed live sports in the cloud

FOX and AWS are continuing to innovate the way live television is created and distributed in the cloud. Now a year into their strategic collaboration agreement with AWS, FOX dives into how they use AWS Media Services to create adaptable, elastic, and efficient workflows. FOX will share lessons it has learned as pioneers moving the television technology industry forward and will give insight into what FOX is working on next.