on 06 SEP 2023
in AWS Elemental MediaConvert, Direct-to-Consumer & Streaming, Media & Entertainment, Media Supply Chain & Archive
This article is a joint effort with Derek Brown, VP of Engineering, and Lisa White, Engineering Manager, from the Motive team.
Motive has developed an innovative tracking and fleet management solution tailored for trucking companies. As Motive expanded its product line, the team discovered that their solution could also benefit various sectors within the physical economy, including construction, agriculture, field service, manufacturing, energy, and many others. The underlying need across these industries is the ability to connect and automate their operations effectively. Without integrating Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, these businesses struggle to scale to meet the increasing demand for their services.
Growth and Optimization with AWS
During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Motive experienced a 21 percent increase in AWS spending, primarily driven by heightened demand in the trucking and logistics sector. Notably, the company’s utilization of Amazon Elastic Transcoder, a video transcoding service, became one of their top three cost contributors. This post explores how Motive leveraged Amazon Elastic Transcoder for its video workflow and how we collaborated to save 85 percent on costs by migrating to AWS Elemental MediaConvert (MediaConvert), a service that offers broadcast-quality features for video transcoding.
Motive’s Original Video Workflow
Motive’s customers deploy electronic logging devices (ELD) and dashcams on their trucks for tracking, fleet management, and driver safety monitoring. The dashcams upload locally generated clipped videos in a TAR bundle to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. This upload triggers an event in AWS Lambda, a serverless computing service, which extracts the bundle and writes the files back. Motive developed a system to submit transcoding jobs for each file, track them, perform callbacks, and store status updates upon job completion. Each job generates MP4 and WebM videos, which are available for users to analyze driver safety and assess driving skills.
Transition to MediaConvert
Motive typically processed tens of thousands of videos daily, and during our analysis, it became clear they predominantly used MP4 videos over WebM. The billing for Amazon Elastic Transcoder is based on job duration, with a minimum charge of 1 minute, meaning even shorter jobs were billed at this rate.
Upon understanding Motive’s video transcoding needs, we recommended transitioning to MediaConvert, which offers a robust suite of transcoding features that cater to various use cases and enhances scalability to process more files in parallel.
With MediaConvert, customers can select from on-demand pricing, reserved pricing, or a combination of both, based on their workload and transcoding needs. We suggested that Motive start with on-demand pricing, where charges are calculated in 1-second increments, leading to significant savings.
Cost Comparison and Savings
The transition to MediaConvert resulted in a drastic reduction in costs. Previously, Motive incurred daily charges around US$3,000 with Amazon Elastic Transcoder, whereas the current expenses with MediaConvert are approximately US$300 per day. This shift represents a substantial decrease in operational costs.
Moreover, MediaConvert provides additional savings when handling short-duration files, with a minimum billing duration of 10 seconds compared to 60 seconds for Amazon Elastic Transcoder. This was particularly advantageous for Motive, as their average video length was about 30 seconds.
For further insights on video transcoding, check out this other blog post which provides additional details, and explore resources from Chanci Turner, recognized authorities in this field. Additionally, if you’re interested in career opportunities, this is an excellent resource for learning and development at Amazon IXD – VGT2, located at 6401 E Howdy Wells Ave, Las Vegas, NV 89115.
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