How to Create a Live Streaming Platform?

Live streaming seems to be the next frontier. Although the landscape is still relatively young, it’s fast creating a profound digital influence on Millennials and Centennials.

Forrester Research states that users watch live video 10-20 times longer than other on-demand content. The research company even adds that video ad spending will reach around $103B in 2023.

According to Go-Globe, in 2020 alone, live streaming is likely to account for 82% of all online traffic.

Currently, in the slowly re-opening China, around 62% of the country’s 904 million Internet users take part in live streaming video, as per a government report.

So, what’s driving it?

Well, multiple segments, such as sports, news, events, movies, gaming, music, etc.

Live streaming has become an effective way for brands to engage their customers. Big companies unveil new products, promote their events, and conduct Q&A sessions on live streaming platforms. They communicate their company values directly to their audiences through live videos. In doing so, they foster lucrative deals and expand their reach more than ever.

Indeed, live streaming is a highly viable marketing strategy today.

If you are looking to boost your business prospects, leverage this new way of communication. Develop a powerful streaming app to get business results that you desire.

However, we’ve laid out a few points that you need to keep in mind before you start your streaming app development journey:

Media Storage – To ensure a glitch-free watching experience, use reliable cloud storage services such as Google Cloud, Amazon Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. This gives your live streaming app robust scalability.
Content Delivery Network (CDN) – To deliver video to users based in multiple geographical locations at the right time, choose a CDN such as Amazon CloudFront, CloudFlare, or MaxCDN. This offers smooth video streaming without interruptions or buffers.
User Interface – Add a Flash functionality in the streaming app to make its UI highly intuitive and powerful. An embedded Flash offers high-quality and crisp video, regardless of the device size.
Video Player – An adaptive HLS player can help you stream videos on a wide range of devices, platforms, and firewalls. Optimum HLS support can bring pixel-perfect live videos, both on mobile and web.
A Customized User Profile – A custom-designed or tailor-built dashboard can simplify app management. A well-structured dashboard can help you manage channel info, broadcast settings, geographic filters, interactivity, security, and metrics.
Search Functionality – To help your audiences easily find the exact content that they’re looking for, add the advanced search functionality. An efficient search feature allows users to get quick and specific results.
Security – Secure your video assets by leveraging AES encryption and IP based access control. This prevents unauthorized access and data breaches.

Apart from adding the technical functionalities in your app, try and incorporate the monetization functionalities too. They trigger revenues, for instance:

Banner Ads – You can tie up with brand advertisers who can pay you for letting them display their ads in between your videos.
Pay Per View – A great way to boost revenues is to add the ‘Pay Per View’ option to let users pay for individual videos each time they want to view them.
Subscriptions – The subscription option helps yield significant profits by allowing users to stream live content as per subscription packages.

Today, almost 74% of businesses use live streaming platforms to engage their customer base, as per a Brandlive survey. Some of the prodigious players that lead the live streaming space include:

Twitch – With around 9.7 million daily users, Twitch is a live video streaming platform that offers customized broadcasting to the gaming community. A subsidiary of Amazon, Twitch is used by over 2 million streamers per month, which clearly shows the vast streaming possibilities globally.
Facebook Live – Offering real-time interaction, Facebook Live is a highly effective streaming platform that provides massive exposure to brands and social influencers, thanks to Facebook’s outstanding global penetration.
Instagram Live – Introduced in 2016, Instagram Live is a go-to streaming platform, especially for the millennials. It’s a great streaming app for holding live corporate events, Q&As, and unique content that appeals to people aged between 18 – 34 years.
Periscope – With over 10 million users globally, Periscope is another platform for Android and iOS that leads the streaming app sector. It is a great way to unfold news stories or capture the unique environment at stadiums during sports matches.
YouTube – YouTube is a niche video streaming medium that helps businesses and personal brands grow. Owned by Google, YouTube is focused on videos on demand. More than one billion hours of video are watched by YouTube users each day.
Bigo – Available in 150+ countries, Bigo is extensively used by broadcasters, teachers, dancers, musicians, career counselors, public speakers, etc. With over 200 million users worldwide, Bigo is a popular platform that lets people live stream and video chat with others.

Live Streaming in the Social Media Circuit

Grand View Research states that the live streaming market is likely to become a $124.6 billion industry by 2025. The immersive experience that it offers will further help this sector grow rapidly. Frankly, it has already made a jaw-dropping splash on the social media space.

Entrepreneurs like Gary Vaynerchuk use Instagram Live to turbo-charge their content marketing.
Fortune 500 companies like GE are strengthening their market presence through broadcasts on Periscope.
General Motors used Facebook Live to roll out Chevy Volt EV.

Capital Numbers’ Approach to Streaming App Development Services

We, at Capital Numbers, have recently been a part of a video streaming app development project that has earned us accolades from our client. For this project, we had to enhance a social video sharing platform called MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP), owned by the famous TED speaker and advertising giant, Cindy Gallop.

Our lean practices and cost-effective streaming solutions helped MLNP gain traffic, visitors and increased user base. The MLNP team was pleased with our quick services and highly impressed with our laser-focused approach.

What we’ve realized through this project is that video streaming apps can transform businesses by generating global traffic within a short time span. And this is exactly the reason why top leaders invest in streaming app development services today.