What is Amazon Kinesis Video Streams?

You can use Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, a fully managed AWS service, to stream live video from devices to the AWS Cloud, or build applications for real-time video processing or batch-oriented video analytics.

Kinesis Video Streams isn't only storage for video data. You can use it to watch your video streams in real time as they are received in the cloud. You can either monitor your live streams in the AWS Management Console, or develop your own monitoring application that uses the Kinesis Video Streams API library to display live video.

You can use Kinesis Video Streams to capture massive amounts of live video data from millions of sources, including smartphones, security cameras, webcams, cameras embedded in cars, drones, and other sources. You can also send non-video, time-serialized data such as audio data, thermal imagery, depth data, and RADAR data. As live video streams from these sources into a Kinesis video stream, you can build applications to access the data, frame-by-frame, in real time for low-latency processing. Kinesis Video Streams is source-agnostic. You can stream video from a computer's webcam using the GStreamer Plugin - kvssink library, or from a camera on your network using real-time streaming protocol (RTSP).

You can also configure your Kinesis video stream to durably store media data for the specified retention period. Kinesis Video Streams automatically stores this data and encrypts it at rest. Additionally, Kinesis Video Streams time-indexes stored data based on both the producer timestamps and ingestion timestamps. You can build applications that periodically batch-process the video data, or you can create applications that require one-time access to historical data for different use cases.

Your custom applications, real-time or batch-oriented, can run on Amazon EC2 instances. These applications might process data using open source, deep-learning algorithms, or use third-party applications that integrate with Kinesis Video Streams.