Live Streaming Platform Development Breakdown (System Design)

The way we consume content is changing quickly thanks to technological advancements. Television is no longer the major source of entertainment. Video streaming applications are unquestionably leading the way as customer preferences shift.

You may watch interviews, sports contests, music concerts, live games, and much more at your leisure.

Today’s media king is live streaming. To design a live streaming app and prevent making mistakes, you’ll need particular information and a basic notion of how your app will appear.

In this post, we’ll look at how to make a live streaming app, including features, tech stack requirements, and more. Let’s begin.

What is a Live Streaming application?

Live streaming is a real-time broadcast of events taking place anywhere that piques one’s attention, which can be viewed on computers, tablets, smartphones, gaming consoles, and smart TVs. Thousands of people can watch and follow their favorite acts in real-time.

Whether it’s news reporting, political events, comedies, cultural presentations, sports games, or video gamers watching one other, as well as top players and captivating showmen, show off their talents to traverse their favorite video games, live streaming is becoming increasingly popular. However, streaming isn’t only for video games.

Popular social networking applications like Facebook, Instagram, and Periscope included live-streaming capabilities to allow users to share and exhibit their activities in real-time.

Imagine the thrill and satisfaction of being able to virtually visit the performance of your favorite rock musician or gamer with only a device, an internet connection, and a single click to watch and enjoy your favorite show online on Facebook, Twitch, and other live-streaming platforms.

What are the types of streaming platforms?

Let’s start with the fundamentals. Live streaming is a real-time video broadcast of specific events that is available for watching through the Internet. It is one of the best and most efficient ways to report from the scene.

Streamers, who utilize various applications classified into numerous sorts, host all broadcasts. Classified into many sorts, There are several live streaming applications available in the most prominent app stores.

So, if you want to learn how to design a live streaming app, we recommend first learning about the many types of streaming apps.

1. Software for live broadcasting

After all, it’s one of the most popular types of streaming media. When you’re watching videos in real-time, this is what you’re doing. It is both recorded and broadcast concurrently.

You can make a live streaming app that shows how people play video games (Twitch), have a live podcast with guests, or debate other topics. Among the most popular live-streaming applications are Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Livestream, Twitch, and others.

2. Streaming video on demand

This one allows people to watch TV shows and movies without having to download them to their devices. They can pause, resume, and rewind content, which is a unique function. In most cases, users must subscribe to have access to the material. Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video are the market leaders.

3. Streaming audio

The underlying premise is the same: consumers can listen to music without having to download anything. Everything is easy. The most popular music streaming services now are Pandora, Spotify, and Apple Music.

4. App for live TV streaming

The ultimate sort of streaming that allows people to watch television online. However, consumers lose their favorite TV episodes, sports networks, series, and other content when they move to on-demand video streaming services.

This is why corporations combine TV broadcasting with live streaming applications. Hulu, Youtube TV, and Amazon Prime Video are video-on-demand services, but they all have ambitions to stream live TV.

What is the Process for Creating the Best Live Streaming Platform?

As there are hundreds of menial and non-menial jobs and processes involved in application development, we’ll take a broad perspective of the major stages.

1. Recruit a group

You’ll need to establish a qualified team of professionals throughout the planning phase of your project to see it through to completion. It should include a diverse group of experts, including business analysts who will assist you in developing a project strategy and direction, developers, QA engineers, and artists who will build the solution and ensure that it functions properly, and even a marketing team if you want to properly promote your app.

2. Select a CDN

CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a must-have step if you want to grow your server and construct a live streaming service. Even if you don’t believe you need it, try to plan ahead of time, and you’ll usually find that it’s a beneficial choice. There will be an extra charge for CDN, but everything will be paid off.

It will ensure that material is delivered without interruption. Your development team should assist you in making the best decision.

3. Storage

All of your information should be kept in a secure location that allows people to watch videos without interruptions or unexpected distortions. Cloud services, we feel, are the greatest alternative for developing live-streaming apps. They are expandable, provide reasonable plans, and help you save money on hardware purchases.

4. Create infrastructure

If you expect hundreds of millions of active users on your platform in the future, you’ll need to invest in some remarkable infrastructure. Users will be able to swiftly access and consume the required material if the necessary resources are available.

Through a dedicated hosting server is a fantastic starting point, we also advocate investing in a CDN such as AWS or Cloudflare. Material delivery networks relieve hosting servers of their workload and make content available to consumers worldwide more quickly.

5. Development

You have everything you need to begin constructing your platform, with the proper professionals and infrastructure in place. The UI/UX design will take a substantial amount of time.

With hundreds of well-known streaming platforms currently on the market, standing out will be a difficult task. Finally, if the service is simple to use, tidy, and convenient for users, coming up with never-before-seen UI/UX techniques may not be essential; you can always add additional design choices later.

Months are often required for the development. Setting up effective networking and data transfer features might be one of the most difficult development tasks you’ve ever faced, but with the appropriate expertise, it’s doable.

6. Post-development

Everything your team creates should be thoroughly tested. This will uncover any faults and flaws before they affect real users. You can take all conceivable measures and produce the greatest possible initial edition of your platform as long as you have time.

Marketing is a procedure that occurs after development (and occasionally concurrently with it). To persuade people to utilize your platform, you’ll need to have it widely displayed or combine it with a popular service.

Finally, maintenance and support should be included. Due to the high data transmission and traffic needs that multimedia apps create, they require far more maintenance than most other programs. As a result, even after the service is launched, you must guarantee that it continues to function as planned and that it does not go down for long enough to affect users.

Live-Streaming Platform MVP features

First and foremost, be clear. Don’t leap in headfirst, and don’t try to cram every function into your streaming app at once. Making an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) initially makes more sense. When you construct a live streaming app, you can see how feasible your app is and what it needs at the start.

You must first select a platform. There are several alternatives available. Native or hybrid streaming applications are also possible. A native application is one that is made for a specific platform. The application’s code is written in a programming language that was built specifically for this platform. A hybrid application is one that can run on many platforms at the same time. It’s made up of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

You’ll need to pick a platform for your first version of the native live streaming app if you’re concentrating on it. It might be an iOS, Android, or web-based application. What should the most important feature of a live streaming app be? The following are the key qualities that such an app cannot have:

• Registration is required of all users.
• Making a user profile that is unique to you
• Streaming from the web
• broadcasting comments
• Client-side search (ability to convert stream)

For now, that’s it. Users can create accounts, broadcast messages, search for other users, and leave comments on broadcasts. This gives you a skeleton of your app, which is sufficient for now.

Tech-Stack for Live Streaming platform

The following is a list of technologies that can be utilized to create a live streaming platform.

• Java, Swift, Kotlin, React and JavaScript are examples of programming languages.
• Amazon’s CDN (Content Delivery Network) CloudFront/Cloudflare
• Node.js API Server
• Amazon EC2 hosting
• AWS Elemental Media Services is a platform for media processing (MediaLive, MediaPackage, MediaTailor)
• Amazon DynamoDB, MySQL, and Oracle databases
• Firebase Notification – Push Notification
• HLS, RTMP, and WebRTC are streaming protocols.

The logic of live streaming software is created using programming languages. Programming languages are used to create custom video players, encode video files, and integrate payment systems.

Monetization Strategy

Let’s be real. When you make a live streaming app, you want to make money utilizing a variety of monetization methods. It’s time to go further into the live streaming app development process.

So, how can you develop a money-making live streaming app? Here are a few popular methods:

• Paid app (monthly, quarterly, or annually)
• Account Type: Free/Premium
• App-based advertising

Conclusion

To summarize, live streaming is becoming increasingly popular, and this isn’t by coincidence; this is a technology that has the power to engage targeted audiences and increase your marketing efforts. Businesses and individuals all across the world are keen to take advantage.

Every day, the field of live streaming expands. Because not everyone can attend live events, more people prefer to watch them online.