Hulu taps AWS as cloud provider for its live TV streaming service

Hulu said it has selected Amazon Web Services as its cloud provider for its recently launched over-the-top (OTT) live TV service.

“Hulu is redefining the television experience for viewers and we have set the technical bar much higher by bringing live TV into the mix,” said Rafael Soltanovich, vice president of software development at Hulu, in a statement. “We selected AWS as our cloud provider because of its leading breadth and depth of capabilities. The elasticity, agility, and security they provide were key to deploying our new service. Putting our stream ingest, repackaging, DVR storage, and origin serving on AWS freed us from having to build out data centers and led to a faster time to market with higher availability.”

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Hulu CTO Tian Lim told FierceBroadcasting in May that Hulu’s live TV service is still scaling in terms of users but that the service’s cloud infrastructure will help it be more flexible as well as better equipped to deal with capacity concerns.

“I do think we have a strategy that will allow us to deal with that. That is why we deployed a lot of our infrastructure into the cloud. It gives us a lot of push capacity to avoid some of the classic pitfalls that you might run into as you scale users,” Lim said.

At the time, Lim said that Hulu’s live TV service was off to a smooth start.

“Yes there are issues but they are very small, contained and generally not our fault, like internet and infrastructure outages,” Lim said.

Hulu’s live TV service officially launched in May. The $39.99-per-month price includes access to all content that comes with a traditional $8/month Hulu subscription. Customers can upgrade to the commercial-free on-demand tier for an additional $4/month.

The package includes 50 hours of recording storage, up to six individual profiles and two simultaneous streams per account. Hulu is offering upgrades including $14.99/month for 200 hours of DVR storage, $14.99/month for unlimited streams, or $19.99 for both add-ons.