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First, identify who is affected
Ask whether buffering began for all viewers at roughly the same time or is limited to a particular device, network, or location. Viewer reports are useful clues, but they do not identify the cause by themselves.
- If many viewers are affected together, check whether the broadcaster stopped sending data or the broadcast session became unstable. When IVS receives no content, it has nothing to deliver, and playback can buffer.
- If only some viewers are affected, investigate their local bandwidth, competing network use, ISP congestion, selected playback quality, and adaptive-bitrate behavior before treating the broadcast as the source.
AWS lists encoder problems, local network conditions, and the public-internet route to IVS as common causes of stream starvation. Diagnose the broadcaster and first-mile path before attributing every buffering report to an IVS service fault. AWS IVS troubleshooting
What is stream starvation?
Stream starvation means IVS is receiving fewer bits over a period than the encoder said it would send. It is a symptom of insufficient incoming stream data, not by itself proof of a service outage. The cause may be the encoder, the broadcaster’s local network, or the route over the public internet to IVS.
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How do I diagnose stream instability using IVS Stream Health?
- Open the IVS Stream Health dashboard. Examine the session’s video bitrate, frame rate, and audio bitrate time series. Look for drops, gaps, or changes that line up with the reported playback problem.
- Inspect session analytics. Review encoder configuration, ingest metrics, and session events to investigate the live session or reconstruct what happened afterward.
- Compare the measurements with the encoder profile. Use the intended production bitrate and observed healthy sessions as context; do not treat a single metric threshold as universally correct.
- Use CloudWatch for metrics and alarms. Check the current AWS documentation for the metrics and retention or rollup details applicable to your monitoring setup.
AWS documents CloudWatch IVS statistics retention of 15 months. Its documented high-resolution metric rollups include three hours at one-second resolution, 15 days at 60-second resolution, 63 days at five-minute resolution, and 455 days at one-hour resolution. These are AWS documentation figures accessed in 2026, not independent measurements; confirm current details in the IVS monitoring documentation.
How do I monitor stream-starvation events?
Use Amazon EventBridge stream-health change events to detect starvation starting and ending. Configure an event rule and target to notify the operations team or invoke an appropriate response. Derive any alert thresholds from the production encoder profile and a healthy observed baseline rather than assuming one threshold suits every stream.
CloudWatch metrics and alarms help track conditions over time, while the Stream Health dashboard and session analytics help investigate a specific session. They serve complementary monitoring and diagnostic purposes. AWS IVS monitoring
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Check local bandwidth and the route to IVS
- Check whether other devices, uploads, downloads, or network processes are consuming bandwidth during the broadcast.
- If the local connection or ISP-to-IVS route appears insufficient, ask the ISP to run network diagnostics.
- For a fixed broadcaster whose Wi-Fi is unreliable, a wired Ethernet connection is an option to consider. It is not a guaranteed fix for congestion or a poor upstream route.
- For viewer-only buffering, check competing network use on the affected device and whether adaptive bitrate or a lower manually selected quality improves playback.
Do not use an individual viewer’s buffering as evidence that the broadcaster’s ingest is failing; correlate viewer impact with session metrics and events.
Verify firewall, protocol, and egress rules
Confirm that the broadcast network allows the destination and ports required by the ingest protocol actually in use. AWS lists these paths for IVS Low-Latency Streaming:
| Protocol or path | Destination and ports | Network detail |
|---|---|---|
| RTMPS | *.live-video.net, TCP 443 |
Encrypted RTMP ingest |
| RTMP | TCP 1935 | Insecure RTMP ingest |
| SRT | *.srt.live-video.net, TCP 9000 |
SRT ingest |
| WebRTC | TCP 4443 for signaling; UDP ephemeral media ports 32768–61000 | WebRTC broadcast path |
AWS says the IVS_LOW_LATENCY IP subnets must be accessible regardless of the selected AWS Region because streamers can connect to any subnet. Before changing production firewall rules, check the current IVS network requirements and AWS IP range data: live lists can change. The cited network requirements do not apply to AWS PrivateLink ingest.
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Review encoder settings and reconnect behavior
Set a suitable keyframe interval
AWS’s setup guide gives two-second keyframes as a standard setting. A one-second interval may reduce latency, but can make the player’s adaptive-bitrate (ABR) logic switch resolutions more often and may increase buffering in some conditions. Avoid intervals above five seconds: AWS warns they can increase startup latency and leave segments without an IDR/keyframe, risking decode errors or visual distortion. Choose based on the latency and playback behavior your stream needs, then validate the result. AWS IVS streaming configuration
Use an appropriate broadcast path
AWS describes the IVS console as a way to test and recommends native IVS Broadcast SDKs especially for production scenarios in its setup guidance. Third-party software or hardware encoders may also be used with supported protocols. AWS strongly recommends against using a third-party service to restream or forward content to IVS because it adds latency. AWS IVS setup guide
Plan for broadcaster-side reconnection
AWS documents that when an encoder stops sending data, IVS waits 30 seconds and then disconnects. A manual or automatic reconnect starts a new stream. Configure and validate reconnection in the encoder or client for your workflow; the disconnect timer is not an ingestion failover mechanism. AWS IVS setup guide
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Understand what IVS failover does—and does not—do
IVS sends and distributes video through a global data plane, and streamers automatically ingest to a nearby point of presence. That does not mean IVS automatically fails over an ingestion or transcoding failure. AWS advises configuring the encoder or client to re-ingest after broadcast failures. AWS IVS resilience
Control-plane regional failover is separate. IVS does not natively fail over its regional control plane; an application that needs that behavior must implement application-side logic. AWS says it has no official guidance for managing regional channel failover, so do not treat an undocumented regional recipe as a supported IVS design. AWS IVS troubleshooting
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Mobile Broadcast SDK errors: collect session details
For mobile broadcasts, the IVS Broadcast SDK’s automatic bitrate adjustment can respond to changing network conditions. If a broadcast error occurs, retrieve the unique broadcast session identifier using the platform API and provide it to AWS Support. Also check that the SDK version is current and review its release notes. The identifier helps support investigate the session; it is not itself a diagnosis or fix. AWS IVS Broadcast SDK documentation
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Troubleshoot by symptom
| Observed symptom | First checks | Next action |
|---|---|---|
| Many viewers start buffering together | Check Stream Health bitrate, frame rate, audio bitrate, and session events for an ingest interruption or starvation. | Inspect encoder output, local bandwidth, route, and reconnection behavior. |
| Only a subset of viewers buffer | Compare affected networks and devices; check local bandwidth competition and selected playback quality. | Investigate viewer-side conditions and adaptive-bitrate behavior before changing the broadcast configuration. |
| Stream Health shows starvation | Compare incoming metrics with the intended encoder profile; check the encoder and first-mile network. | Review local processes, ISP route, and firewall or egress rules for the chosen protocol. |
| Broadcast cannot connect or is disrupted | Verify protocol destination, ports, and IVS_LOW_LATENCY subnet access. | Check the live network requirements and AWS IP range data; validate encoder reconnection separately. |
| Mobile SDK reports a broadcast error | Capture the session identifier, SDK version, and relevant release-note context. | Share the identifier with AWS Support and use session analytics to inspect the event. |
Reliability is not an uninterrupted-stream guarantee
AWS documentation accessed in 2026 describes IVS Low-Latency channel latency as under five seconds and IVS real-time stage latency as under 300 milliseconds. These are service latency descriptions, not reliability guarantees. AWS’s troubleshooting page states an IVS SLA of 99.9%; consult the current IVS SLA terms for the applicable contractual commitment rather than treating that figure as a promise of uninterrupted streaming.
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