Amazon Kinesis Video Streams vs Bitmovin

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Amazon Kinesis Video Streams

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Bitmovin

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Amazon Kinesis Video Streams vs Bitmovin: What are the differences?

Introduction

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams and Bitmovin are two widely used technologies for streaming video content. While both serve similar purposes, there are key differences that set them apart. In this article, we will explore these differences to help you understand which solution best fits your needs.

  1. Data Processing: One major difference between Amazon Kinesis Video Streams and Bitmovin lies in their approach to data processing. Amazon Kinesis Video Streams enables real-time processing of video data by providing SDKs and APIs that allow developers to build custom applications for stream analytics, machine learning, and other real-time video processing tasks. On the other hand, Bitmovin focuses primarily on providing a cloud-based transcoding and streaming platform, offering pre-built tools and workflows for video processing and delivery.

  2. Scalability and Resilience: Another significant difference is in terms of scalability and resilience. Amazon Kinesis Video Streams is designed to handle massive scale and offers automatic scaling to accommodate fluctuating workloads. It can handle streams from millions of devices simultaneously and provides robust resilience against failures. Bitmovin, on the other hand, offers scalability through its cloud-based infrastructure but may not offer the same level of automatic scaling or resilience as Amazon Kinesis Video Streams.

  3. Integration with Other Services: Amazon Kinesis Video Streams tightly integrates with other AWS services, providing seamless integration with popular tools like Amazon Rekognition for video analytics and Amazon S3 for scalable storage. This allows developers to build comprehensive video workflows within the AWS ecosystem. On the other hand, Bitmovin is designed to be a standalone solution for video processing and delivery, which might require additional integration efforts to connect with other services or tools.

  4. Video Codec Support: When it comes to video codec support, Bitmovin offers a wide range of options including popular codecs like H.264, HEVC, and VP9. It also provides support for adaptive bitrate streaming protocols such as HLS and DASH. Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, on the other hand, focuses more on real-time streaming and does not provide extensive codec support. It primarily supports H.264 and H.265 codecs for efficient streaming.

  5. Pricing Model: Pricing is another area where Amazon Kinesis Video Streams and Bitmovin differ. Amazon Kinesis Video Streams offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where you are billed based on the volumes of your video streams ingested, processed, and stored. Bitmovin, on the other hand, offers a subscription-based pricing model, allowing you to choose from different plans based on your expected usage and requirements.

  6. API Flexibility: Lastly, the flexibility of APIs offered by Amazon Kinesis Video Streams and Bitmovin varies. Amazon Kinesis Video Streams provides a robust set of APIs and SDKs that allow developers to build customized video applications and integrate with various AWS services. Bitmovin also offers APIs for managing and controlling its cloud-based infrastructure, but the level of customization and flexibility might be more limited compared to Amazon Kinesis Video Streams.

In Summary, Amazon Kinesis Video Streams and Bitmovin differ in terms of data processing approach, scalability, integration with other services, video codec support, pricing model, and API flexibility. Depending on your specific requirements and use case, you can choose the solution that best fits your needs.

Advice on Amazon Kinesis Video Streams and Bitmovin
Needs advice
on
BitmovinBitmovin
and
WowzaWowza

We want to make a live streaming platform demo to show off our video compression technology.

Simply put, we will stream content from 12 x 4K cameras ——> to an edge server(s) containing our compression software ——> either to Bitmovin or Wowza ——> to a media player.

What we would like to know is, is one of the above streaming engines more suited to multiple feeds (we will eventually be using more than 100 4K cameras for the actual streaming platform), 4K content streaming, latency, and functions such as being to Zoom in on the 4K content?

If anyone has any insight into the above, we would be grateful for your advice. We are a Japanese company and were recommended the above two streaming engines but know nothing about them as they literally “foreign” to us.

Thanks so much.

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Replies (1)
Recommends
on
WowzaWowza

I've been working with Wowza Streaming Engine for more than 10 years, and it's likely very well suited to your application, particularly if you intend to host the streaming engine software. But, you should confirm that both the encoding format (e.g. H.264) and transport protocol (e.g. RTMP) you intend to use is supported by Wowza.

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We would like to connect a number of (about 25) video streams, from an Amazon S3 bucket containing video data to endpoints accessible to a Docker image, which, when run, will process the input video streams and emit some JSON statistics.

The 25 video streams should be synchronized. Could people share their experiences with a similar scenario and perhaps offer advice about which is better (Wowza, Amazon Kinesis Video Streams) for this kind of problem, or why they chose one technology over the other?

The video stream duration will be quite long (about 8 hours each x 25 camera sources). The 25 video streams will have no audio component. If you worked with a similar problem, what was your experience with scaling, latency, resource requirements, config, etc.?

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Replies (1)
Amit Mor
Software Architect at Payoneer · | 6 upvotes · 10.7K views
Recommends
on
AWS LambdaAWS Lambda

I have different experience with processing video files that I'll describe below. It might be helpful or at least make you think a bit diffferent about the problem. What I did (part of it is a mistake): To increase the level of parallelism at the time consuming step which was the video upload, using a custom cmd tool written in Python, I splitted the input videos to much smaller chunks (without losing their ordering - just file name labeling with timestamp) . It then uploaded the chunks to S3. That triggered a few Lambdas that each first pulled a chunked video, did the processing with ffmpeg (the Lambdas were the mistake - at that time the local Lambda storage was up to 512MB so lots of chunks and lots of Lambdas had to be in place, also Lambda are hell to debug), later called Rekognition and later using AWS Elemental MediaConvert to rebuild the full length video. I would use some sort of ECS deployment where processing is triggered by S3 event, and scale the number of Fargate nodes dependent on the number of chucks/videos. Then each processor pulls its video (not stream) to its local storage (local EBS drive) and works. I failed to understand why are you trying to stream videos that are basically static, as a file, or that putting the files on S3 is a current limitation (while your input videos are 'live' and streaming) that you're trying to remove ?

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What is Amazon Kinesis Video Streams?

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams makes it easy to securely stream video from connected devices to AWS for analytics, machine learning (ML), and other processing. Kinesis Video Streams automatically provisions and elastically scales all the infrastructure needed to ingest streaming video data from millions of devices. It also durably stores, encrypts, and indexes video data in your streams, and allows you to access your data through easy-to-use APIs.

What is Bitmovin?

It provides adaptive streaming infrastructure for video publishers and integrators. Fastest cloud encoding and HTML5 Player, play Video Anywhere.

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What are some alternatives to Amazon Kinesis Video Streams and Bitmovin?
OBS Studio
It is a free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. It is equipped with a powerful API, enabling plugins and scripts to provide further customization and functionality specific to your needs. It supports all your favorite streaming platforms and more.
Wowza
It offers a customizable live streaming platform to build, deploy and manage high-quality video, live and on-demand. It powers professional-grade streaming for any use case and any device.
Mux Video
It is an API-first platform, powered by data and designed by video experts to make the beautiful video possible for every development team.
api.video
api.video is an API-first platform which enables developers to build, scale and operate on-demand and live video streaming in their own apps and platforms in minutes, with just a few lines of code.
Ant Media Server
It is streaming engine software that provides adaptive, ultra low latency streaming by using WebRTC technology with ~0.5 seconds latency. It is both horizontally and vertically scalable. It can run on-premise or on-cloud.
See all alternatives