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Amazon CloudFront

Why CloudFront for Media and Entertainment?

Amazon CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that has been highly optimized for Media & Entertainment industry workloads. You can use CloudFront to deliver massive video-on-demand catalogs or live stream your content to millions. No matter where your audience is, reach them globally through 700+ of Points of Presence (PoPs), a private network backbone, and software that’s been tuned and optimized over the last decade. The world’s largest live events and leading online video platforms (OVPs) use CloudFront for its industry leading security, performance, reliability, and full AWS stack integration.

For best practices, read the Amazon CloudFront for Media White Paper.

Benefits

Amazon CloudFront provides ultra-low latency performance for video delivery. With 700+ global Points of Presence, a network approaching petabit-per-second capacity, and a highly optimized software architecture, CloudFront distributes adaptive bitrate streams consistently and at scale. Video workload features like multi-tiered caching, connection collapsing, background fills, pre-fetching, and connection optimization enables CloudFront to start streams fast, play them with consistent throughput, and deliver high-quality video on every device.
Amazon CloudFront provides features that help secure your valuable content - support for encryption and certificate management, content access controls such as geoblocking, signed URLs or cookies, and integration with Amazon S3 authentication via Origin Access Identity (OAI), are all included capabilities. CloudFront also works seamlessly with AWS Shield and AWS WAF, providing proactive security, DDoS protection, and other attack mitigations to keep your high-profile video streams running and accessible.
Amazon CloudFront has the integrations and features you need to develop video workloads. Integrate seamlessly with other AWS services like Amazon S3 and AWS Elemental MediaStore, MediaPackage and MediaLive. Full API configuration and integration with SDKs, AWS CloudFormation templates, and other developer and dev-ops tooling makes CloudFront easy to support in your automated workflows. Programmability and compute offerings like Lambda@Edge allow for sophisticated edge-logic triggered by CloudFront request/response events. Use these building blocks to create authentication, entitlement, manifest tokenization, and origin selection to personalize your media applications.
For large media events, AWS Elemental offers Media Event Management (MEM). MEM provides guided support through the planning and deployment phases of your media applications with a co-developed risk assessment and mitigation plan (RAMP), an initial Operational Readiness Review (ORR), weekly ORR updates, test plan recommendations, operational run-books, pre-event practice runs, and day-of-event support with war-room presence. This can be coordinated across multiple media-related services such as Amazon CloudFront and AWS Media Services. Working with MEM, you can reserve CloudFront capacity to ensure event capacity.

Video-on-Demand

Whether you are a Video-on-Demand (VOD) or OVP provider, CloudFront allows you to deliver large, long-tail content catalogs to audiences all over the globe. Working in conjunction with AWS Media Services like AWS Elemental MediaConvert and AWS Elemental MediaPackage, CloudFront is a fully integrated, easy to use, CDN for both simplified and sophisticated video production workflows. Get started with VOD implementation guides, AWS CloudFormation templates, architectural considerations, configuration steps, AWS best practices documentation, and all the resources you need. 

Live Streaming

When executing a large-scale live event, you have little room for error. You need a CDN with performance and reliability. CloudFront is optimized for live streaming with an architecture built for high request volumes. It can handle millions of users calling for the same manifest or video segments while maintaining  an ultra-low latency stream. CloudFront can be configured to deliver streams with sub-three second camera to device screen latency and sub-one second synchronization. It is fully integrated with AWS Elemental MediaStore, an optimized low-latency origin server built for live streaming, AWS Elemental MediaLive for video encoding, and AWS Elemental MediaConnect for video transcoding.