The Eurovision Song Contest: From the Stadium to the Cloud

The Coronation of Elizabeth II was the first event to be broadcast live internationally by Eurovison Services. Learn from Alexandre Rose how technology has evolved since then and which role AWS Services play in live video broadcasting today.

awscloud June 26, 2022

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In this video the AWS team interview Alexandre Rose, Deputy Manager of Engineering and Technology for Eurovision Services, to review their architecture for the media streaming platform that delivers the Eurovision song contest to a global audience.

They are seeking to reduce their on-premise footprint and reach new customers. The first step is from cameras in the stadiums, which connect to two encoders that function to reduce the bandwidth requirements.

Each outputs two feeds via Direct Connects to AWS, where they input to Media Connect services. The dual approach is to ensure resilience and they also utilize the 2022-7 protocol of the Media Connect service to aggregate the streams, which is acting as a virtual switch for IP video flows.

This configuration serves two main use cases:

High quality bit rate, provided to clients in the same AWS region, so that they can guarantee the SLAs.
Low quality distribution, where the content is fed into EC2 instances for transcoding, creating mezzanine formats injected into S3 buckets and then published to a CloudFront service, for distribution to a global audience.

Furthermore the S3 service is also used to enable VOD replay services for clients.