AWS Media Services
AWS media services handle the processing, packaging and delivery of audio and video at a scale of millions of viewers or devices.
Amazon Elastic Transcoder is gone
Section titled “Amazon Elastic Transcoder is gone”Elastic Transcoder was the original file-based transcoding service and appears throughout older AWS material as the default choice. AWS discontinued it on 13 November 2025. After that date the Elastic Transcoder console and its resources became inaccessible. Do not design around it.
The replacement is AWS Elemental MediaConvert, which AWS positioned as the migration target: broader codec support including 8K and high frame rates, HDR and Dolby Vision, more flexible pricing, and greater scale.
AWS Elemental MediaConvert
Section titled “AWS Elemental MediaConvert”File-based video transcoding with broadcast-grade features.
- Converts source files into renditions suited to different devices and connection speeds
- High-quality compression, audio normalisation and digital rights management
- Job-based: submit a job against an input in S3, receive outputs in S3
- Job templates and output presets keep encoding settings consistent across a library
Use for: video-on-demand libraries, adaptive bitrate ladder generation, format normalisation of user-uploaded video.
AWS Elemental MediaLive
Section titled “AWS Elemental MediaLive”Live video encoding.
- Real-time transcoding of a live input into multiple outputs
- Multi-channel audio and closed captioning
- Redundant pipelines for resilience during a live event
Use for: live broadcast, live event streaming, 24/7 channels.
AWS Elemental MediaPackage
Section titled “AWS Elemental MediaPackage”Packaging and origination for internet delivery.
- Just-in-time packaging into the streaming formats clients ask for, rather than pre-generating every format
- Acts as the origin for both live and video-on-demand content
- DRM integration and content protection
- Time-shifted viewing features such as start-over and catch-up
Use for: serving one encoded source to many player types without storing a copy per format.
Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS)
Section titled “Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS)”Managed live streaming with a low-latency path from broadcaster to viewer, plus a timed-metadata channel for synchronising application events with the video.
Use for: interactive live experiences — auctions, live shopping, gaming streams, audience Q&A — where round-trip latency matters more than broadcast-grade encoding control.
Streaming ingest
Section titled “Streaming ingest”Video and other streaming data are ingested through the Kinesis family:
- Amazon Kinesis Video Streams — ingests, buffers and makes video available for playback and for processing frame by frame, which is how camera and doorbell devices deliver footage into AWS
- Amazon Kinesis Data Streams — ordered, replayable streams of non-video records
- Amazon Data Firehose (renamed from Kinesis Data Firehose on 9 February 2024) — delivery of streaming data into S3, Redshift, OpenSearch and other destinations
Kinesis is covered in full under messaging and integration.
Delivering at scale
Section titled “Delivering at scale”- Amazon CloudFront for delivery, to cut latency and absorb request volume near the viewer
- Amazon ElastiCache to keep frequently read metadata off the database
- Amazon DynamoDB for viewer sessions, preferences and playback position
- AWS Lambda for event-driven work around the media pipeline — metadata extraction, thumbnail generation, triggering a transcode when a file lands
Monitoring
Section titled “Monitoring”- Amazon CloudWatch for service health, job success rates and encoding metrics
- AWS CloudTrail for an audit trail of API activity
- Amazon Athena over delivery logs in S3 for consumption analysis
Design for fault tolerance across Availability Zones from the outset: a media pipeline that cannot survive the loss of one component will fail during exactly the live event it was built for.