AWS – AWS announces Media Quality-Aware Resiliency for live streaming

Starting today, you can enable Media Quality-Aware Resiliency (MQAR), an integrated capability between Amazon CloudFront and AWS Media Services that provides dynamic, cross-region origin selection and failover based on a dynamically generated video quality score. Built for customers that need always-on ‘eyes-on-glass’ to deliver live events and 24/7 programming channels, MQAR automatically switches between regions in seconds to recover from video quality degradation in one of the regions. This is designed to help deliver a high quality of experience to viewers.

Previously, you could use a CloudFront origin group to failover between two AWS Elemental MediaPackage origins in different AWS Regions based on HTTP error codes. Now with MQAR, your live event streaming workflow has the resiliency to withstand video quality issues including black frames, freeze or dropped frames, or repeated frames. AWS Elemental MediaLive analyzes the video input delivered from the source and dynamically generates a quality score reflecting perceived changes in video quality. Subsequently, your CloudFront distribution continuously selects the MediaPackage origin that reports the highest quality score. You can create CloudWatch alerts to be notified of quality issues using the provided metrics for quality indicators.

To get started with MQAR, deploy a cross-region channel delivery using AWS Media Services and configure CloudFront to use MQAR in the origin group. CloudFormation support will be coming soon. There is no additional cost for enabling MQAR, standard pricing applies for CloudFront and AWS Media Services. To learn more about MQAR, refer to the launch blog and the CloudFront Developer Guide.

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