Ultra-Low-Latency Live Streaming on Amazon IVS
Real-time video and secure HLS delivery for enterprise events
The problem
Enterprise live events are only real if the video is real-time. Q&A, polls and synchronized slides all refer to what the speaker just said, so a multi-second broadcast delay pulls the interaction out of sync with the moment it belongs to. On top of the live path, a back catalog of over a thousand recorded sessions had to play smoothly across phones and unreliable networks, stay access-controlled for gated content, and not run up a bandwidth bill.
Options on the table
Architecture at a glance
The decision
Amazon IVS carries the live low-latency path so the interactive layer stays locked to the stream, a secure HLS pipeline with token-based encryption serves on-demand and gated content, and the legacy library was migrated to adaptive-bitrate HLS with AWS MediaConvert.
How it works
- 1Live sessions broadcast through Amazon IVS for low-latency playback, so the audience sees the speaker in near real time.
- 2The interactive layer (AppSync Q&A, polls, synchronized slides and captions) is held in lockstep with the IVS stream, so a poll or slide lands with the moment it refers to.
- 3On-demand and gated video is served over HLS with token-based encryption and access control, so only entitled viewers can play a session.
- 4Over a thousand legacy videos were migrated to adaptive-bitrate HLS with AWS MediaConvert, improving quality across devices and cutting bandwidth against the old single-rate delivery.
- 5Playback analytics — watch time, framerate, completion — feed the telemetry pipeline that powers reporting and the e-learning progress bar.