Amazon Is Launching Pay-As-You-Go Cloud Computing In Space (technologyreview.com)

At its annual re:Invent conference in Seattle this week, Amazon unveiled a service that lets owners of satellites rent time on Amazon-managed ground stations to send and receive data from orbit. "The service, called AWS Ground Station, works in much the same way as Amazon's well-established business for tapping computing capacity via the cloud," reports MIT Technology Review. From the report: According to an AWS blog post, big businesses with a large number of satellites typically build and operate their own ground stations at a cost of a million dollars or more for each one. Smaller companies that can't afford their own often end up signing inflexible, long-term contracts with third parties that own and run such stations. The new service will let satellite operators get access to a ground station at short notice on a pay-as-you-go basis. Those who know how much capacity they will need well in advance can book ahead and pay less for downlink time. AWS is kicking off with a pair of ground stations and says it will have a total of a dozen up and running by the middle of next year. It will monitor how demand develops before deciding how many more stations to add.

Comments

I work for a large broadcast company - this is ver

[MarkH]

Managing global downlink centres is a big and expensive business. You need diversity for not just resilience but also local weather conditions.

With only 2 downlink nodes for now not too useful except to experiment with. Also a lot depends on the quality control systems in place to manage signal acquisition and correction plus seemless switchover modes supported.

But definitely one for mix. Could open market for smaller rebroadcasters to consume sport 'world feeds' into OTT services without physical setup.