SEATTLE, Wash.—AWS has announced the availability of Amazon EC2 VT1 instances, a launch that will make live multi-stream video transcoding with resolutions up to 4K UHD easier and more cost effective.
The release is designed to tap into a growing wave of content creators and live broadcasters looking to capitalize on the burgeoning demand for video content and to help them deliver great image quality without sacrificing reliability or paying a hefty price tag, AWS said.
Amazon EC2 VT1 instances features Xilinx U30 media transcoding cards with accelerated H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC codecs, and can offer price reductions per stream of 35-percent or more compared with Amazon EC2 GPU instances, which are best suited for graphics-intensive applications, AWS said.
Featuring networking interfaces of up to 25 Gbps that can ingest multiple video streams over IP with low latency and low jitter, Amazon EC2 VT1 instances make it possible for customers with broadcast and streaming video pipelines to fully embrace scalable, cost effective, and resilient infrastructure, AWS also noted.
Amazon EC2 VT1 instances are available in three sizes, all of which can transcode multiple streams per instance, the company said. Streams can be processed independently in parallel or mixed (picture-in-picture, side-by-side, transitions).
Additionally, the instances can help with implementing color correction, watermarking, titling, audio normalization, graphics overlay, or color space conversion, as well as simultaneously output multiple streams at different resolutions (1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p) and in both H.264 and H.265.
Coupled 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, AWS reported.
They can also be used with AWS Elemental MediaPackage for reliable preparation and packaging of final content and AWS Elemental MediaStore.
Amazon EC2 VT1 instances are now available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), 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 networking latency low. AWS Outposts supports Amazon EBS and Amazon S3, which can be used for content caching, playback, and archiving. For more details, visit https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/vt1/.
