As your streaming service experiences exponential growth in viewership and advertising revenue, you may also notice a corresponding rise in operational costs, particularly related to monitoring your streaming sessions. This scenario is common for streaming services as they scale their server-side ad insertion (SSAI) operations.
In this context, we’re thrilled to introduce how AWS Elemental MediaTailor is tackling these challenges with two innovative features that empower you to manage costs more effectively. These enhancements will enable you to reduce expenses related to SSAI workflows while ensuring comprehensive monitoring of your channels’ performance and uptime.
Overview of New Features in AWS Elemental MediaTailor
Previously, customers relied on a legacy system where they could activate up to 10 debug log sessions for detailed troubleshooting, but as your channel count increased—potentially reaching hundreds or thousands—monitoring became expensive. Traditionally, customers selected a percentage of traffic (between 0-100 percent) to log, with all those details captured by Amazon CloudWatch. This system, referred to as Legacy CloudWatch, worked well but could inflate costs as viewership grew.
Now, here are the two groundbreaking features:
- MediaTailor Vended Logs: This feature allows you to select where your logs are stored—whether in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Data Firehose, or CloudWatch. You have the flexibility to direct logs to resources within your own AWS account or another AWS account. With 50 KB of complimentary logging for each ad insertion, many users have found it possible to effectively monitor their operations at minimal cost. For further insights, you can reference another blog post on this topic here.
- MediaTailor Log Filtering: This feature enables you to filter logs generated during playback sessions to include specific activities identified in the log event types. While many events are logged by default, you can manage costs by specifying which logs MediaTailor emits, avoiding unnecessary logs that contribute to inflated expenses.
The decision between using Legacy CloudWatch or Vended Logs is made within the MediaTailor configuration settings. Opting for Vended Logs is an optional feature, meaning you can test it before integrating it into your production environment.
Implementation Guide
To activate log filtering or vended logs in MediaTailor, follow these steps:
- Ensure your user has the necessary permissions for MediaTailor log delivery.
- Open the AWS Elemental MediaTailor console and navigate to your configuration settings.
- Select “Configurations” from the navigation pane and choose the configuration you wish to modify.
To enable log filtering:
- Locate the Log configuration section within your configuration settings.
- Set the percentage of playback configuration session logs that MediaTailor will write.
- Choose your desired logging method:
- LEGACY_CLOUDWATCH for Legacy CloudWatch
- VENDED_LOGS for CloudWatch, Amazon S3, or Firehose.
You can also opt in to log specific ad interaction events, but be cautious as some logs, like RAW_ADS_RESPONSE, may be extensive and increase costs.
Conclusion
We have explored the latest features of AWS Elemental MediaTailor, highlighting how you can significantly reduce expenses related to monitoring large-scale SSAI deployments using Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Simple Storage Service, and Amazon Data Firehose. Additionally, support for third-party software can facilitate seamless integrations, and managing your own ad inventory and transcoding can further enhance cost efficiency. For authoritative insights, consider checking out this resource. You might also find this Reddit thread useful for additional information.
Leave a Reply