AWS strengthens multistream video transcoding with Amazon EC2 VT1

Amazon EC2 VT1, instances from AWS that aim to make live multi-stream video transcoding at resolutions up to 4K UHD easier and “more cost-effective”, are now available.

The launch of Amazon Web Services seeks to respond to the demand from content creators and broadcasters to feed the growing global demand for video content. The AWS Amazon EC2 VT1 instances feature Xilinx U30 media transcoding cards with accelerated H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC codecs, and offer “35% better” per-stream pricing than Amazon EC2 GPU instances, which are better suited for graphics-intensive applications.

The new EC2 VT1s feature up to 25 Gbps network interfaces, which enable ingesting multiple video streams over IP with low latency and low jitter, enabling “scalable and efficient” video streaming and transmission pipelines. Amazon EC2 VT1 instances are available in three sizes, all of which can transcode multiple streams per instance independently in parallel or mixed (picture-in-picture, side-by-side, transitions). Furthermore, instances can help implement color correction, watermarking, dithering, audio normalization, graphics overlay or color space conversion, as well as simultaneous output of multiple streams at different resolutions (1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p) and in both H.264 and H.265.

Together with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon EC2 VT1 instances can be used to efficiently scale transcoding workloads and, with Amazon CloudFront, to deliver content globally. They can also be used with AWS Elemental MediaPackage for reliable preparation and packaging of final content and AWS Elemental MediaStore.

Available now

Amazon EC2 VT1 instances are now available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions.

VT1 instances are also available for on-premises deployment through AWS Outposts racks to support integration with uncompressed content workflows and keep network latency low. AWS Outposts supports Amazon EBS and Amazon S3, which can be used for content caching, playback and archiving.