Amazon recently announced IVS Real-Time Streaming, a new option of the Interactive Video Service to deliver real-time live streams for latency-sensitive use cases. To address different network conditions for the viewers, IVS supports layered encoding (simulcast).
The new real-time streaming supports up to 10,000 viewers with a maximum of 12 hosts from a stage, maintaining low latency from the host to the viewer. Donnie Prakoso, senior developer advocate at AWS, explains:
To deliver real-time streams, you need to interact with a stage resource and use the Amazon IVS Broadcast SDK available on iOS, Android, and web. With a stage, you can create a virtual space for participants to join as either viewers or hosts with real-time latency that can be under 300 ms.
Last March AWS introduced support for multiple hosts in live streams by using stages, virtual spaces where participants can exchange audio and video in real time, but the feature was limited to 12 hosts with a 3–5 seconds latency for viewers via channels. The latency restricted the ability to support interactive experiences, for example, videos for social media applications or for latency-sensitive use cases like auctions. Prakoso adds:
If you need to extend the stream to a wider audience, you can use your stage as the input for a channel and use the Amazon IVS Low-Latency Streaming capability. With a channel, you can deliver high-concurrency video from a single source with low latency that can be under 5 seconds to millions of viewers.
Launched 3 years ago, IVS is a live-streaming solution that allows developers to add live video to apps and websites. It is designed to make low-latency or real-time video available to viewers around the world, with video ingest and delivery available over a managed network of infrastructure optimized for live video.
It is possible to stream to Amazon IVS with the native mobile broadcast SDKs (which support RTMPS) or any other streaming software or device that supports RTMPS or RTMP. Using the same live streaming technology and global infrastructure behind Twitch, the service is designed for companies who want to run their internal broadcasts: Amazon highlights other use cases for the new real-time feature, including applications that enable transforming viewers into hosts for real-time interactions, side-by-side competitions, audio rooms, and live video auctions.
Furthermore, the cloud provider released the layered encoding feature for Real-Time Streaming, automatically sending multiple variations of video and audio to a stage: high, medium, and low layers. Adaptive streaming ensures that viewers can continue to receive the stream at the best quality based on their network conditions. Layered encoding is supported on Android, iOS, and Chrome desktop browsers.
Source: AWS Documentation
Amazon IVS charges an hourly rate for the duration that hosts or viewers are connected, starting at 0.0720 USD per hour. The new Real-Time Streaming is available in all AWS regions where IVS is supported.