Live events: Moving on-premises broadcast workloads to the cloud

This morning, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how we at Amagi are using AWS to run live events and migrate what is now traditionally on premise workload to the cloud.

So maybe just to set the stage a little bit, looking at the traditional workloads that broadcasters around the world are running today. When you're looking at live events, large premier sports, they're spending tons of money on licensing of those sporting events. And they're looking for ways to monetize that beyond their traditional pay TV.

Their hardware is traditionally set up as on prem, there's hardware stacked in data centers. A lot of capital expense is used for upfront, setting up that hardware. They have a hard time scaling that. So they've spent might be months even years building up stacks of hardware and they're limited to that to run their broadcasts.

And then there today, for distribution is typically pay TV, whether that's cable or satellite. And they don't have infrastructure for streaming to nextgen platforms. So these are some of the constraints that traditional broadcasters are faced with today.

They also have, as they look at cloud and migrating workload from on prem to the cloud, they have some issues and hurdles that they think about. I'll walk through each of these and tell you why these are not issues for Amagi and for our customers:

• Latency - There's a view that potentially the cloud introduces extra latency. That's not true. There's plenty of cases where we can show latency is not an issue for premier events.

• Super Bowl - There may be some concerns about whether or not they can run the Super Bowl on a streaming platform. And the truth is we've already run the Super Bowl for NBC and Peacock and Telemundo streaming that in past years.

• Library optimization - Looking back at their hardware stacks, they can't figure out how to scale up and do more events, more sports, premium, tier two, tier three sporting events. But with cloud infrastructure, that's possible today.

• ROI - Is the cost of cloud, can they justify that? And we can justify that through multiple distribution channels.

So we can expand from their pay TV, their traditional cable telco and satellite and expand that on to new platforms that make more money.

I'll give you an example of one of our customers who's doing this today at scale. DAZN is a sports aggregator, next gen platform for sports content primarily in Europe today. They're licensing premium sports brands, leagues and local sports at different levels. They're doing licensed events for NFL, Serie A in Europe and Formula One in certain countries where they have rights to stream that.

In terms of single live events in the cloud, our software together with AWS is able to spin up new servers just for the duration of the event. So we're keeping the costs low, we're allowing them to scale up the number of sports that they're supporting. So now they're doing over 30 different events at the same time, all scaled up in the cloud, no more need to go figure out how to provision a bunch of hardware and stacks of hardware in a data center or a head end.

In terms of distribution, we're maximizing the monetization of this content by allowing them to scale up multiple events that are targeting different demographics of users, expanding their viewership onto over the top platforms and applications and then creating new capabilities for new inventory, new ad inventory for new ad revenue.

So with this as a foundation, we're now able to address all sorts of different events, not just sporting events, but it might be live cooking shows, live streaming of events like this, live concerts, awards shows - all sorts of interesting new ability to monetize live events at scale with the cloud.

So single live events in the cloud today, it's available today. We're doing this in production at scale for multiple customers. The ability to run parallel events take what might have been done in broadcast and add two or three or four other types of sports or leagues into what a broadcaster might be able to stream today.

We're expanding business models allowing them direct to consumer and over the top ability for distribution and we can demonstrate profits ROI and a lower cost on cloud than investing in this heavy capex hardware.

So we announced just recently a new product that helps do this at scale together with AWS. We've introduced Amagi DYNAMICS which allows for scheduled live events to be orchestrated through APIs. We're able to turn up these services, bring them down when they're over and do this with scheduled live events at scale.

This is software that's essentially running today that allows you to do everything that we've discussed previously. Our view is this is a stepping stone for moving and creating a hybrid migration path from what is traditionally hardware-based broadcast encoding and services to bring that into a cloud environment.

Providing all sorts of APIs to allow you to integrate your scheduling your events. We're providing all sorts of things like live and file playback, redundancy is built into the solution, automatic recording of the events. So anything that's been broadcast live, we're able to record that and then replay that at a later time again, expanding the monetization capabilities.

And then of course, all the data analytics that come with cloud solutions thus allowing essentially scaling out of business models beyond traditional pay TV, beyond cable and telco into fast applications into direct to consumer apps and OTT as well.

Looking at the total addressable market here, 70% of people in the US watch live sports, that's not even counting all the other live events that go on. And that number is just going to grow as premium content continues to expand. We're able to expand that into tier two, tier three types of sporting content. So colleges, high schools even, all of this is possible through cloud technology.

We're able to scale in the cloud so demonstrated recently the International Cricket World Cup had 43 million concurrent viewers during that India versus New Zealand match. So this technology scales today, it's available today, it's reaching customers today.

And looking at the live streaming industry by 2027, it's over $180 billion. So there's money to be made here and Amagi and AWS are here to help.

So I'll leave you with the last message - Go live, go live with cloud and go live with Amagi.

Thank you very much.