Discovery taps AWS to power rollout of discovery+

Discovery Inc. has extended its strategic relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support Discovery’s ongoing transformation in the cloud.

Discovery is a global provider of real-life entertainment, serving fans around the world. Discovery’s portfolio of television channels include Animal Planet, Food Network, HGTV, OWN, TLC, and the Travel Channel.

As Discovery’s preferred cloud provider, AWS powers the majority of the company’s infrastructure needs to deliver its discovery+ on-demand streaming video service, its digital services, and more than 450 linear TV channels (traditional scheduled programming) to viewers around the world.

With AWS, Discovery also provides greater personalization of discovery+, helping viewers easily find content that appeals to their interests.

Discovery relies on Amazon Personalize to offer recommendations for curated content that matches viewer’s specific interests, customizing the browsing experience. Discovery also uses Amazon Transcribe (AWS’s service for automatically converting speech to text) across its linear broadcast channels and streaming services to accurately generate closed captions to ensure content is inclusive and accessible to hearing-impaired viewers, and Amazon Rekognition (AWS’s service for automated image and video analysis) to extract and tag video content with metadata to provide viewers with a searchable video library and more personalized recommendations.

“AWS provides the unparalleled portfolio of services, global infrastructure, and proven performance we need to reliably deliver our premium content at scale to Discovery viewers all over the world,” said Avi Saxena, chief technology officer, Direct-to-Consumer at Discovery, Inc. “Running on AWS, we have the agility and elasticity we need to deliver quality viewing experiences for peak events like the Olympics, as well as scalable machine learning capabilities to deliver meaningful personalization to viewers so they can get the most value out of their subscriptions.”

As well as being Discovery’s preferred cloud provider, AWS is also the official cloud, AI, machine learning, and deep learning provider of Discovery Sports Events.