This post is part of a From The Archives series I am doing to move my posts over from LinkedIn. This was originally posted on December 1, 2023.
I was the second employee hired when I joined the AWS Event Livestream team in 2021. The livestream infrastructure we owned could fit in a single carry-on pelican case: a collection of Elemental Links used to stream re:Invent 2020.
I was the second employee hired when I joined the AWS Event Livestream team in 2021. The livestream infrastructure we owned could fit in a single carry-on pelican case: a collection of Elemental Links used to stream re:Invent 2020.
I carried two backup Elemental Links in my backpack below my clothes on the way to the AWS DC Summit in 2021. Those encoders were half of our inventory.
While we had excellent vendor partners who supported our field operations, content acquisition, transmission, and distribution, I was still determining if we could scale our operation without drastically scaling headcount. Also, there were better approaches than just demanding exponential growth from our vendor partners.
In early 2022, Ted Frank and I discussed how to scale our operations, increase production values, build highly available broadcast infrastructure, and save the business money. We did considerable research and talked to colleagues at Prime Video and the AWS M&E Solutions Architecture team to determine our next steps.
We soon realized that the way to scale, increase production values, deploy permanent broadcast infrastructure, and save money was to build the first remote broadcast facility at AWS. While a broadcast facility alone wouldn't single-handedly scale our operation, we believed it would be the global hub from which our operation would grow.