Reduce SSAI costs using new features in AWS Elemental MediaTailor

Your streaming content is taking off, viewership is soaring and ad revenue is increasing. However, the costs of monitoring all those streaming sessions, and remaining operational, are also increasing. Sound familiar? Streaming services face this challenge every day as they scale their server-side ad insertion (SSAI) streaming operations.

We are excited to share how Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elemental MediaTailor (MediaTailor) is addressing this challenge with two dedicated features that put the decision-making power back in your hands. We will demonstrate how using MediaTailor for SSAI workflows can help minimize spending, while maintaining overall visibility into their channels’ health and uptime, as you gain insights on your SSAI fill rates.

Overview: Latest features of AWS Elemental MediaTailor

Customers can use up to 10 active debug log sessions to force logging for specific sessions, which remains an excellent method for verbose troubleshooting of a specific session. However, for large scale monitoring of 100s or 1000s of channels, your MediaTailor logging was accomplished by choosing a percentage (0-100 percent) of the traffic you wanted to track. Amazon CloudWatch (CloudWatch) would diligently log every detail of those selected sessions. While this worked well, it came with a cost that grew alongside your viewership. Going forward we will refer to this logging capability as Legacy CloudWatch.

The two new features that change the game:

1. MediaTailor Vended Logs: This feature gives you the freedom to choose where your logs will be stored. Whether you prefer Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Data Firehose (Firehose) or CloudWatch. You can choose to send the logs to resources in your own AWS account or another AWS account, whichever makes more sense for your business case. With 50 KB of free logging for each ad insertion, many customers are discovering that they can monitor their operations effectively while paying almost nothing at all.
2. MediaTailor Log Filtering: This feature can filter logs emitted from a playback configuration in MediaTailor to include information about a variety of activities that happen during the playback session. These activities are identified in the event type of the logs. Many events are logged by default. To help control the cost of Legacy CloudWatch, you can specify which logs that MediaTailor emits, and avoid any unnecessary logs to help lower costs.

Selection of Legacy CloudWatch or Vended Logs is completed at the MediaTailor configuration. Enabling the new Vended Logs is an opt-in feature, so it will not be active until you enable it on your configurations. You can experiment with it before rolling it into production.

Implementation guide

To enable log filtering or vended logs in MediaTailor use the follow steps.

First, to use vended logs in MediaTailor, make sure your user has the correct permissions for MediaTailor Log delivery.

Open the AWS Elemental MediaTailor console.

Go to your configuration settings:

• Select Configurations from the navigation pane
• Choose the configuration you want to modify

Enable log filtering:

• In the configuration settings, locate the Log configuration section.
• Set the percentage of playback configuration session logs that MediaTailor will write.
• Select the log method you want to use:
  • LEGACY_CLOUDWATCH: To send logs to Legacy CloudWatch.
  • VENDED_LOGS: To send logs to CloudWatch, Amazon S3 or Firehose.
• Select ADS interaction log opt-in events.
  • RAW_ADS_RESPONSE: Log event contains the entire VAST or VMAP response from the Ads Server (ADS). Such logs can be extensive and might increase logging costs.
• Select ADS interaction log exclude events.
  • Indicates that MediaTailor won’t emit the selected events in the logs that describe integrations with the ADS. For a full description of ADS log events read AWS Elemental MediaTailor ADS logs description and event types.
• Select Manifest service interaction log exclude events.
  • Indicates that MediaTailor won’t emit the selected events in the logs that describe interactions with the manifest service. For a full description of manifest service log events read AWS Elemental MediaTailor manifest logs description and event types.

Figure 1: MediaTailor Log configuration.

If you selected VENDED_LOGS in your Logging Strategy for the delivery of MediaTailor Logs you will need to select the Tab Vended Logs to add your desired vended log delivery.

Figure 2: MediaTailor Vended Logs configuration tab.

Add a new Log Delivery by selecting the correct destination. You can select from three options:

1. Amazon CloudWatch
2. Amazon S3
3. Amazon Data Firehose

For Amazon S3 or Firehose resources you can choose if these resources are in the current account or in another account.

Select the log type to send to the desired resource (shown in Figure 3):

• AD_DECISION_SERVER_LOGS
• MANIFEST_SERVICE_LOGS
• TRANSCODE_LOGS

Figure 3: Vended Logs configuration delivery to an S3 bucket.

In the example (Figure 3), we are using example-destination-bucket-name, but you can choose any S3 bucket from your account or another AWS account.

Conclusion

We reviewed the newest AWS Elemental MediaTailor features, illustrating how you can lower your overall cost associated with monitoring large-scale server-side ad insertion deployments using Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Simple Storage Service, and Amazon Data Firehose.

Support for third-party software is also available to help streamline your integrations. For certain customers, managing your own ad inventory and ad transcoding can further lower costs. Make sure to follow What’s New with AWS? for future Media Services updates so you don’t miss any of our newest releases.

Contact an AWS Representative to know how we can help accelerate your business.

Further reading

• AWS Elemental MediaTailor now supports bring your own ads (BYOA) via VAST responses
• Preparing your video library for AVOD OTT
• SCTE UPID Handling in MediaTailor