How we Implemented 4K Video Streaming for 5000+ students using AWS Services

In today's digital age, video content is a crucial element for education, entertainment, and communication. To meet the demands of high-quality video streaming, especially in educational contexts where large audiences are common, it's essential to have a robust and scalable infrastructure. This blog will walk you through how to build a video streaming feature that supports uploading high-quality 4K videos from the admin side and streaming to over 1000 students simultaneously using AWS services.

The Challenge

We needed to create a solution that allows:

• Uploading high-quality 4K videos.
• Streaming videos to more than 5000 students simultaneously.

The Solution

We leveraged five key AWS services to build our solution:

1. Amazon S3: Storage for videos.
2. Amazon CloudFront: CDN for streaming the videos.
3. AWS Elemental MediaConvert: Job for converting videos from MP4 format to HLS format.
4. Amazon EventBridge Rules: To monitor the job's completion status.
5. Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS): Queue to handle messages from the rules once the job status changes to completion.

Implementation Flow

Uploading Videos to Amazon S3

High-resolution videos have large file sizes, requiring efficient upload mechanisms. We utilize the MultiPart Upload feature of Amazon S3 to upload large video files quickly, assuming good network bandwidth. This method divides the video file into smaller parts and uploads them concurrently, significantly speeding up the process. Refer to AWS documentation on Multi-part upload for detailed steps.

Converting Videos with AWS Elemental MediaConvert

After the video is uploaded to S3, we create a job in AWS Elemental MediaConvert to convert the MP4 video format to HLS format. HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) is a widely used video streaming protocol supported by most devices. MediaConvert processes the video and stores the converted HLS files back in S3.

Monitoring Job Completion with Amazon EventBridge Rules

AWS provides EventBridge Rules to detect the status of MediaConvert jobs. When a job completes, the rule sends the job's information to a pre-configured SQS queue.

Handling Queue Messages with Amazon SQS

Once the message is sent to the SQS queue, we define a queue handler in our server using the @ssut/nestjs-sqs package. This handler processes messages from the queue and performs tasks such as updating the video's status to 'Ready' in the database or notifying the administrator about the successful conversion and storage.

Streaming Videos via Amazon CloudFront

Upon successful job completion, we use AWS CloudFront CDN to deliver the videos to a large number of users. CloudFront ensures fast and reliable streaming by caching content at edge locations worldwide, providing low latency and high transfer speeds.

Implementation of Video Streaming using AWS Services

HLS allows client devices to adapt to changing network conditions by adjusting the quality of the stream, making it ideal for large audiences. Here’s a quick rundown of the setup:

1. Amazon S3: Set up a bucket for storing video files.

2. Amazon CloudFront: Configure a distribution to stream videos from the S3 bucket.

3. AWS Elemental MediaConvert: Create a job to convert MP4 videos to HLS.

4. Amazon EventBridge Rules: Monitor MediaConvert jobs.

5. Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS): Handle job completion messages.

Alternative Solutions

Consider using Cloudflare Stream for streaming high-quality videos as an alternative to AWS services.

Conclusion

By leveraging AWS services, we can efficiently handle the challenges of high-quality video uploading and streaming to large audiences. This solution ensures a seamless experience for both administrators and students, providing a scalable and reliable video streaming infrastructure.

Implement this setup to enhance your video streaming capabilities and deliver high-quality content to your users effortlessly.