Hulu taps Amazon Web Services for live TV offering

Hulu’s live TV offering

Hulu selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the cloud provider for its recently launched Hulu with Live TV streaming service.

AWS revealed details of the partnership yesterday and said it is providing the scalable infrastructure to support Hulu’s addition of more than 50 live channels following its launch of live, over-the-top TV in May 2017.

“Leaders in media and entertainment like Hulu are looking for more efficient ways to build scalable streaming and OTT solutions,” said Mike Clayville, vice-president, worldwide commercial sales at AWS.

“AWS’s unmatched scalability and reliability allow Hulu to continue to innovate and break new ground – like delivering live TV alongside their extensive on-demand programming – without having to spend millions of dollars and thousands of person hours building and managing data centres.”

Hulu’s vice-president, software development, Rafael Soltanovich, said Hulu had selected AWS because of the “breadth and depth” of its cloud capabilities.

“The elasticity, agility, and security they provide were key to deploying our new service. Putting our stream ingest, repackaging, DVR storage, and origin serving on AWS freed us from having to build out data centres and led to a faster time to market with higher availability.”

Hulu launched its live TV streaming service in beta in the US at the beginning of May, offering more than 50 live and on-demand channels for US$39.99 (€36.60) per month.

The service also includes access to Hulu’s pre-existing US$7.99-per month premium streaming service for no extra cost, along with 50 hours of recording storage, up to six individual profiles and two simultaneous streams per account.

AWS’s other media and broadcast partners include Amazon Video, AOL, BBC, Channel 4, Discovery Communications, Guardian News and Media, Lionsgate, Netflix, SoundCloud, and Spotify.