Case Study: Slack improves video playback and captions with AWS Elemental MediaConvert and Amazon Transcribe

Slack improves media playback to seconds with AWS Elemental MediaConvert and Amazon Transcribe

Slack, an intelligent productivity platform, sought to revamp its media pipeline for its video and audio "clips" feature. The customer faced challenges with long video buffering times, lack of client compatibility, and poor text legibility in presentations. To overcome this, Slack turned to vendor AWS Elemental and leveraged AWS Elemental MediaConvert to transcode media and Amazon Transcribe for captions.

The solution implemented by AWS Elemental used MediaConvert to process uploads into HLS for adaptive bitrate streaming, enabling near-immediate playback. Amazon Transcribe generated time-stamped transcriptions in parallel. This resulted in streaming playback improved by orders of magnitude, with buffering becoming negligible. The solution also enabled support for 1080p resolution and made content searchable, significantly enhancing quality and accessibility.

Slack