Company
Date Published
Nov. 15, 2018
Author
Phil Cluff
Word count
3865
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Amazon and Twitch have both implemented different technology stacks for streaming Thursday Night Football. Amazon uses MPEG DASH with H.264 encoding in 2-second fMP4 fragments, while Twitch employs Apple HLS format with the same codecs. Both services use Widevine and Playready for content protection and manifest manipulation-based server-side ad insertion (SSAI). Amazon uses AWS Elemental MediaPackage for packaging and Elemental MediaTailor for SSAI, while Twitch has its own in-house encoder and CDN. The key difference between the two services is that Twitch's architecture enables a significantly lower latency stream compared to Amazon's approach.