Case Study: PBS achieves 50% fewer video streaming errors and scalable petabyte‑level delivery with Amazon Web Services

PBS - Customer Case Study

PBS, the non-profit Public Broadcasting Service, delivers educational and entertainment programming across TV, web and mobile through nearly 360 member stations. PBS Interactive experienced frequent video playback failures and freezes from its incumbent CDN and lacked measurement tools to identify the source, so the team implemented monitoring to evaluate alternative CDNs while already using AWS services like EC2 and S3.

After testing, PBS migrated most video content to Amazon S3 and began delivering it via Amazon CloudFront, completing the move in weeks. The change cut streaming errors by about 50%, sped up testing with CloudFront invalidation and log analysis, and now delivers nearly all PBS streaming (over one petabyte per month) more reliably, freeing the team to focus on building apps and improving viewer experience.

PBS

Drew Engelson

Chief Architect and Senior Director of Platform Development