Create a mechanism for transferring media assets to your customers and partners

Publication date: June 2021 (last update: April 2023)

Traditional file transfer services for media supply chain are expensive, can add unnecessary hours to a workflow, and are not optimized for in-the-cloud media ecosystems. The Media Exchange on AWS solution provides Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers and Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partners a common method for direct media asset transfer within the ecosystem.

This solution creates a shared object storage area using an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket between publishers and subscribers in a separate, secured AWS account. Publishers and subscribers do not share credentials. Publishers copy the assets into this shared S3 bucket and create permissions to allow subscribers to pull the content from the shared resource. As a result, assets do not leave the S3 data plane. In addition to being secure (assets are encrypted at rest and in transit), this process provides the following benefits:

• No per GB data egress and transfer costs within the same AWS Region.

• No egress, schedule, or delivery time dependencies.

• No servers to manage.

• Asset tracking and receipt confirmation. All operations on the assets are tracked via AWS CloudTrail and Amazon S3 server access logs.

• Asset quality and fidelity.

Each publisher-subscriber transfer relationship gets its own S3 bucket to share assets. Publishers have write permissions to this bucket, a subscriber can only view assets under their assigned bucket and import assets that are shared with them. The assets shared in the account are lifecycle deleted after a publisher-defined period.

This solution can work seamlessly with non-S3 storage systems as a source and destination. It does not require the assets to be coming from or going to Amazon S3.

This solution can integrate with native AWS file transfer offerings, such as AWS DataSync and AWSSnow Family devices to help transfer assets between physical locations for customers who do not currently integrate Amazon S3 into the media supply chain. You can also use it to move content across large geographical distances by leveraging AWS global infrastructure.

This implementation guide describes architectural considerations and configuration steps for deploying Media Exchange on AWS in the AWS Cloud. It includes links to an AWS CloudFormation template that launches and configures the AWS services required to deploy this solution using AWS best practices for security and availability.

The guide is intended for IT architects, developers, DevOps, MediaOps, and other technology professionals who have practical experience architecting in the AWS Cloud.