Bitmovin Announces Support for AWS for Media & Entertainment Initiative

Bitmovin, a leading provider of video infrastructure for global digital media companies, announced its support for the AWS for Media & Entertainment initiative from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to optimize video encoding workflows, enhance the consumer viewing experience and significantly lower cost.

AWS for Media & Entertainment is an initiative featuring new and existing services and solutions from AWS and AWS Partners, built specifically for content creators, rights holders, producers, broadcasters, and distributors. AWS for Media & Entertainment also simplifies the process of building, deploying, and reinventing mission-critical industry workloads by aligning AWS and AWS Partner capabilities against five solution areas: Content Production; Media Supply Chain & Archive; Broadcast; Direct-to-Consumer & Streaming; and Data Science & Analytics.

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The amount of on-demand content that consumers are streaming has skyrocketed since the start of the pandemic resulting in higher bandwidth and storage costs. According to Bitmovin’s Annual Developer Report 47 percent of respondents view cost as a top priority followed by faster time to market for services and assets (40 percent). Bitmovin’s Cloud Connect service enables over-the-top (OTT) streaming service providers to deploy Bitmovin’s encoding software on their own AWS infrastructure and use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances to save up to 90 percent on costs.

Bitmovin’s encoding solution was natively built for the cloud and takes a chunk-based encoding approach that results in content to be delivered at up to 100x real-time. It also reduces CDN and storage costs by delivering the highest video quality possible at the lowest bitrate. Bitmovin encodes MPEG-DASH, Apple HLS, Smooth Streaming, progressive TS, and progressive MP4 streams. With these formats, development teams can reach all major devices. The streams can be played back with all major multimedia players and with the Bitmovin Player to provide maximum device reach.

Giving Customers the Full Benefits of AWS to Accelerate Innovation

As part of Crackle Plus’s integration with Bitmovin Cloud Connect the streaming provider will have access to the Bitmovin platform via its API with the encoding tasks performed on their own AWS account. Bitmovin’s encoding solution will handle most of the hard work of scaling up or down the number of Amazon EC2 instances to process video quickly and efficiently. Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity on AWS. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand pricing.

Fueling Cost-savings with Lower Hosting and Bandwidth Requirements

Additionally, Bitmovin’s advanced per-title encoding feature drives more cost savings by delivering the best perceivable quality at the lowest possible bitrate, which leads to fewer encoded files to store, less bandwidth usage and lower hosting costs. Bitmovin’s encoder also features multi-codec, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos and more to enhance the viewing experience.

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“As an OTT streaming service provider competing in the current media and entertainment landscape, it’s critical we deliver a high-quality viewing experience to our audience in a way that reduces cost,” said Justin Fujita VP Engineering, Crackle Plus. “We chose Bitmovin because of their expertise and award-winning encoding solution which has us on a conservative path to reduce 25 percent of our current CDN and storage spend.”

“Crackle Plus is a textbook example of how customers can optimize cost by scaling infrastructure to meet subscriber demand. OTT providers pay only for the services they use, when they use them,” said Eric Iverson, Chief Technologist for M&E, AWS. “AWS Partners like Bitmovin give customers added flexibility to best suit their unique individual needs, whether that’s to optimize cost, accelerate time to market, or to reliably deliver and monetize streaming services.”