Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - How Prime Video delivers NFL’s Thursday Night Football globally on AWS (AMZ203)

Summary

• Dennis Calhoun, Senior Customer Solutions Manager for AWS Strategic Account, introduces the session and shares a personal football story.
• Manish Ro, Director of Playback and Delivery Engineering from Prime Video, discusses Prime Video's requirements for NFL's Thursday Night Football and the benefits of using AWS.
• Megha Khandi, Senior Manager of Product Management from AWS CloudFront, explores AWS CloudFront's role in delivering NFL's Thursday Night Football on Prime Video.
• Prime Video has been streaming live sports since 2016, with a significant expansion in events and geographical reach since then.
• The 11-year contract with the NFL for Thursday Night Football (TNF) is highlighted as a key part of Prime Video's live sports strategy.
• Manish outlines the technical challenges of delivering TNF, including scale, delivery, device landscape, ads, latency, availability, resiliency, and customer experience.
• Dennis explains how Prime Video uses AWS services to address these challenges, focusing on AWS Elemental Media services for live streaming and ad insertion, and AWS data science and analytics for the Prime Vision experience.
• Megha details how AWS CloudFront supports the delivery of TNF, emphasizing the importance of network infrastructure, embedded POPs, and the AWS backbone for high-quality service.
• The session concludes with a summary of the importance of constant innovation and collaboration between Prime Video, AWS Elemental, and AWS CloudFront to deliver TNF successfully.

Insights

• Prime Video's live sports streaming has grown significantly since 2016, indicating a strategic focus on live content as a differentiator in the streaming market.
• The TNF contract with the NFL is a landmark deal, marking the first time an NFL season is exclusively broadcast on an OTT service, reflecting the NFL's confidence in Prime Video's technology and operations.
• The technical challenges of delivering live sports at scale are complex and multifaceted, requiring sophisticated solutions for scaling, delivery, device compatibility, ad insertion, latency, availability, resiliency, and customer experience.
• AWS services, particularly AWS Elemental Media services, play a critical role in enabling Prime Video to meet these challenges, showcasing the capabilities of AWS in the media and entertainment industry.
• AWS CloudFront's network infrastructure, including edge locations, mid-tier caches, and the AWS backbone, is crucial for delivering high-quality streaming experiences to a large and geographically dispersed audience.
• The use of AWS Elemental Media Event Management Services (MEM) for pre-event readiness, monitoring, and post-event analysis underscores the importance of proactive and continuous improvement in live event streaming.
• The session demonstrates the collaborative effort and ongoing innovation required to deliver high-profile live events like TNF, highlighting the potential for AWS customers to leverage similar technologies for their own large-scale streaming projects.