Enable time-shifted viewing - AWS Elemental MediaTailor

Enable time-shifted viewing

Time-shifted viewing means that viewers can start watching a live stream at a time earlier than the time of request, permitting them to join from the beginning a program that's already in progress or to watch a program that's already completed. MediaTailor channels support time-shifted viewing for content that's up to 6 hours old. You can enable time-shifted viewing for some or all of this content by defining the maximum time delay on the channel. Clients can shift the manifest window back in time, by up to the configured maximum time delay, by including valid time-shifting parameters on requests.

Time-shifted viewing is available on STANDARD tier channels with the LINEAR playback mode. MediaTailor channels support time shifting for all VOD sources, and for live sources that utilize MediaPackage V1 or MediaPackage V2 origins configured with sufficient startover windows.

Important

MediaPackage V1 and MediaPackage V2 channels used as live origins for MediaTailor channels must have sufficient startover windows. We recommend a startover window that is at least 10 minutes longer than the sum of the maximum time delay and the manifest-window duration on your MediaTailor channel.

For information on how to configure a startover window on a MediaPackage V1 channel, refer to Time-shifted viewing reference in AWS Elemental MediaPackage in the MediaPackage V1 user guide. For information on how to configure a startover window on a MediaPackage V2 channel, refer to Time-shifted viewing reference in AWS Elemental MediaPackage in the MediaPackage V2 user guide.

To enable time-shifted viewing

  1. Enable time-shifted viewing by typing a value for Maximum time delay when configuring a MediaTailor channel. You can do this through either the MediaTailor console or the MediaTailor API. The minimum allowed maximum time delay is 0 seconds, and the maximum allowed maximum time delay is 21600 seconds (6 hours).

    When MediaTailor receives requests for this channel with time shifting parameters that conform to the configured maximum time delay, MediaTailor generates a sliding window manifest starting at the specified time. If the values provided for the time-shifting parameters require a delay that exceeds the maximum time delay, then the requests fail. If the request has no time-shifting parameters, the service generates a manifest with no delay.

  2. Make sure that content requests contain time-shifting parameters as needed. A request can have up to one time-shifting parameter. For information on specific time shifting parameters, see Time-shifting parameters for manifest requests.

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