August 10, 2022 (10 months ago)
Using data to drive decision-making can be one of the most impactful strategies for your business growth and trajectory. When aggregated and analyzed, data can help you identify trends, make informed conclusions, and revise your approach to product, development, marketing, and more.
You can gather a lot of data from video interaction in particular. By understanding how your viewers (or your customers’ viewers) are interacting with your videos, you’ll have greater insight into what content is working, which playback environments are most effective, and where you have room for improvement.
Mux Data provides a customer-facing data dashboard out of the box, allowing you to assess the performance of your video content without any additional work on your part. But what if you want to go further and bring your viewing data in-house, to a custom data lake, where the only limit for how you can use the data is your imagination.
Here at Mux, we’re happy to partner up with AWS to enable view data to be streamed to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. In this post, you’ll learn how to configure your AWS account to process real-time view data from Mux viewing sessions, allowing you to take the next step toward providing and receiving insights for your application.
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a scalable and durable real-time data streaming service that can continuously capture gigabytes of data per second from hundreds of thousands of sources. Popular use cases for Kinesis Data Streams include streaming log and event data, running real-time analytics, and powering event-driven applications.
Here, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams will act as a handler for your Mux viewing data. You can then decide what the next step for your data is based on your needs. Examples of practical use cases include:
These are just a few examples, but the possibilities for how you can leverage your data are endless.
To kick off this process, visit the Streaming Exports section of your Mux dashboard and click on New streaming export.
On this page, you’ll be presented with a few settings that you can use to configure your streaming exports integration:
Note: while you can create your Kinesis data stream in any AWS region, the data Mux sends originates in us-east-1. You might want to consider setting up your Kinesis data stream in us-east-1 to avoid incurring additional data transfer charges from AWS.
AWS has specific documentation available describing how to create a role that enables access for an external AWS account. There are two notable values to point out in this process:
Let’s get going on the IAM role setup.
Click the Create Policy button. This will open a new tab.
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [
"kinesis:ListShards",
"kinesis:PutRecord",
"kinesis:PutRecords"
],
"Resource": [
"arn:aws:kinesis:{region}:{account-id}:stream/{stream-name}"
]
}
]
}
Now, head back over to your other open browser tab, which is in the middle of the role creation process.
In order to enable view data to be streamed to your AWS account, we need both values for your Stream ARN and Role ARN. Head back to your Mux dashboard, and on the Streaming Exports page, enter your Stream ARN and Role ARN. Lastly, click on the Enable export button to finish up the process.
Once you’ve completed the integration, you’ll be able to see your view data being sent to your Kinesis stream.
You’re good to go! You now have Amazon Kinesis Data Streams configured to capture your Mux view data in real time. What comes next is up to you — and the possibilities are endless.
Note that while this is a fully functional configuration, AWS can be configured in many ways, some of which may be better suited for your AWS environment and use case. We're happy to support where we can and work alongside your AWS team to find the right solution for you, but we ultimately cannot dictate how you set up your AWS environment.
If you need any assistance or hit any unexpected snags during this process, let us know! Mux has partnered with AWS to ensure we can provide you with the solutions you need for view data stream capture.
*Keep in mind that it’s also possible to set up this entire stack using infrastructure-as-code tooling like CloudFormation or AWS CDK.
**On-demand data streams will automatically adjust the shards as the load changes. While provisioned data streams can also be used, on-demand data streams provide the best experience for scalability and ease of setup.
***Depending on your use case, you may wish to go a step further and enable server-side encryption for your data. AWS has great reference materials for getting server-side encryption set up.
No credit card to start. $20 in free credits when you're ready.
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