AWS Launches Amazon EC2 VT1 Instances

AWS has launched Amazon EC2 VT1 instances, making live multi-stream video transcoding with resolutions up to 4K UHD easier and more cost effective.

The release arrives as a growing wave of content creators and live broadcasters look to feed the rapidly increasing global demand for video content, delivering great image quality, without sacrificing reliability or a hefty price tag. Designed to provide the best price performance for multi-stream video transcoding, Amazon EC2 VT1 instances feature Xilinx U30 media transcoding cards with accelerated H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC codecs, and provide more than 35-percent better price per stream than Amazon EC2 GPU instances, which are best suited for graphics-intensive applications.

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. Amazon EC2 VT1 instances are available in three sizes, all of which can transcode multiple streams per instance. 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. They can also be used with AWS Elemental MediaPackage for reliable preparation and packaging of final content and AWS Elemental MediaStore.