Amazon Launches AI Video Conversion Tool for Real-Time Vertical Live Streaming

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is expanding into the social media live streaming market with the introduction of AWS Elemental Inference. This new service acts as an AI agent designed to automatically convert and optimize video content in real-time for vertical viewing formats.

The company states that this service will help broadcasters and streamers better engage audiences on social media platforms like Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, which primarily display content vertically. This poses a challenge for broadcasters since most video is still produced in traditional landscape format, requiring significant manual editing to optimize for vertical display. Amazon notes that as a result, audiences on social media platforms often miss live moments due to broadcast delays.

AWS Elemental Inference allows live video streams to be optimized for vertical platforms without manual editing. It performs required multi-step conversions by analyzing the video stream in real-time and automatically applying the correct changes, ensuring viewers on social media platforms do not miss any critical details. The platform tracks all subjects and ensures all important actions are retained when the video is converted to the 9:16 vertical format.

The service is launching today in four AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai).

According to AWS, it can apply vertical conversion with a latency of only 6-10 seconds, enabling near real-time vertical live streaming. For broadcasters and other content creators, this means they no longer need to perform extensive editing themselves and can focus on producing high-quality video.

AWS indicates that the Elemental Inference service integrates with its existing AWS Elemental MediaLive platform for live video encoding, allowing users to enable AI optimization without adjusting their existing video architecture. It is supported by a fully managed foundation model that is automatically updated and optimized by AWS engineers, so content creators can utilize it without any AI expertise.

In addition to vertical conversion, AWS Elemental Inference performs advanced metadata analysis in real-time, allowing it to automatically detect and extract clips from live videos to distribute highlights in vertical format in real-time. For sports live streaming, this means it can identify moments such as touchdowns, goals, game-changing plays, and emotional highs the instant they occur. Highlights can be optimized for vertical platforms almost immediately, ready to broadcast directly on social media platforms.