AWS Machine Learning brings you: The Royal Wedding

AWS and Machine Learning to bring you: The Royal Wedding

What every your thought are about the royal wedding, spectators from around the world will be preparing to watch Prince Harry and Meghan Markle get married at Windsor Castle this weekend on Saturday, May 19th, 2018.

Sky News has teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Leverage Machine learning (ML) to enhance its delivery of the event like never before.

“For Sky News, the historic event has become a singular opportunity to bring viewers a powerful, interactive experience and a world first in the way it uses machine learning to enhance the user experience of a live-streamed news event.”

To achieve this functionality, Sky News has collaborated with AWS and AWS partners GrayMeta and UI Centric to bring machine learning-enhanced live video at scale to 23 million Sky viewers.

Sky has developed a new live element to its mobile app; ‘The Royal Wedding: Who’s Who’,  which will identify and highlight A-List celebrity guests as they arrive and appear on screen, using ML to deliver details about their connection to the Royal Couple.

“We’re excited by the software’s potential and ability to give audiences new ways of consuming content,” David Gibbs, Director of Digital Sports and News Products at Sky, said. “Sky continuously searches for ways to innovate and bring better coverage to its customers. This new functionality allows Royal Wedding viewers greater insight into one of the biggest live events of the year, wherever they are.”

Users of the app will be able to navigate through the app in self-guided, hands-on experience for each celebrity spotting; keeping the main visual content on screen without moving away from the app.

A video feed from an outside broadcast van located near St. George’s Chapel will capture faces of arriving guests and feed the signal to an AWS Elemental Live small form factor appliance located nearby for real-time ingest to an entirely cloud-based workflow.

Video processing is handled with the AWS Elemental MediaLive service. AWS Elemental MediaPackage integrates digital rights management for secured distribution over the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN). Sky News will also use the AWS Elemental MediaPackage service for live-to-VOD applications such as catch-up TV.

Lastly, Sky News will use Amazon CloudFront content delivery network to unify the content for faster distribution to viewers. UI Centric has designed and developed the front-end application and video player to enhance the viewing experience and to leverage the Sky machine-learning workflow.

“We’re excited to have helped Sky News successfully build and deploy ‘The Royal Wedding: Who’s Who Live app,” Alex Dunlap, General Manager at AWS Elemental, said. “The high visibility and unpredictable audience size for this type of event made AWS cloud services, including those for media, a great solution by giving Sky the ability to test quickly, only pay for what was used, and produce a reliable, high-quality experience in a matter of weeks.”

Sky News also plans to use the AWS Elemental MediaPackage service for live-to-VOD applications, such as Catch up TV.

Guests of the Royal Wedding will begin arriving from 9:30 am GMT this Saturday, continuing until the start of the ceremony at noon. The Royal Wedding: Who’s Who functionality is accessible at Sky News online or via the Sky News app for mobile devices.