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AWS took part in a situational awareness day, held annually by the US military and its partners. The experience has led to better use of cloud-based video by governments BOOTS ON THE GROUND, EYES IN THE SKY
on platform and PED (processing, exploitation, dissemination) video/ geospatial applications running on Amazon Machine Images, powered by AWS Snowball Edge Compute and Storage Optimized devices. During the event, attendees shared insights about the challenges associated with their mission video systems. In response, AWS developed a strategy for implementing a hybrid workflow to enhance video performance, quality and resiliency in disconnected, intermittent and limited-bandwidth environments: 1. EMBRACE HYBRID FULL MOTION VIDEO AND STREAMING Until recently, most government video systems mirrored legacy commercial broadcast and IPTV designs – a camera connected to an AVC or HEVC encoder, compressing video, encapsulating using traditional MPEG-2 transport streams and transmitting over a managed IP network. These flows involved laborious IP multicasting protocols. Evolutions in media and entertainment streaming technologies and the cloud offer government organisations new tools to implement hybrid cloud and on-premises architectures that support broadcast-quality video for enterprise and tactical operations. The architecture pulls from familiar commercial contribution techniques using MPEG-2-based transport streams, combined with ground or cloud-based adaptive bit rate (ABR) video processing, aimed to improve quality across the enterprise.
or governments around the world, video is often the gateway for gathering intelligence and developing awareness of a
situation on the ground around the clock. These government organisations rely more and more on full motion video (FMV). Unlike commercial media and entertainment markets, where content is carefully crafted, government organisations can generate and consume huge amounts of content on the fly, in near real time. Government video can originate in areas of the world far outside its own country, in extreme environments, and may be time sensitive or mission critical. Effective video processing techniques are essential for high image quality and reliable performance, and also improved accessibility when it matters most. The Enterprise Challenge is an annual American joint and coalition intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance interoperability demonstration. It’s sponsored by the office of the US Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence – or USD(I). At this year’s challenge, Amazon Web Services demonstrated how government organisations can combine AWS and AWS Elemental services with traditional video infrastructure to improve video processing at the tactical edge. The event served as an operational proving ground, applying cloud-enabled technologies to real-time simulated mission environments. These real-world scenarios include how emergency responders could be supported with aerial video after an infrastructure-crippling natural disaster, how
footage could be furnished to troops on the ground in a combat scenario and how airborne sensor-equipped systems might provide another set of eyes to vessels in a search-and-rescue mission at sea. AWS Elemental demonstrated various aspects of a hybrid cloud workflow, leveraging AWS services aimed at improving the FMV quality of experience over constrained ground-based RF networks. It distributed reliable video streams to local tactical users and performed protected contribution of live FMV content to AWS Cloud Regions. The architecture involved use of a number of AWS services, including AWS Elemental Live on-premises encoding systems, combined with AWS Elemental MediaConnect, MediaLive, and MediaPackage for video transport, encoding, packaging and origination. In addition, nearly a half-dozen AWS Partner Network (APN) partners were involved in the exercise, deploying technologies that included ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) sensor systems, which used AWS Elemental Live small form-factor HEVC/H.265 encoding
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