Mobile applications have replaced television as a source of information, a marketplace, and a creative outlet. The rules of marketing and e-commerce are being rewritten by Internet celebrities. Likes, comments, and shares on social media have essentially become a new form of money.
The value of a customer's attention is almost equal to that of oil or gold. When organizations, entrepreneurs, and artists are vying for the precious seconds of every viewer, anything goes.
What better way to grab their attention than something one-of-a-kind that is happening right now and will never happen again? That's all there is to it – real-time content. Live video streaming services have recently become a popular addition to social media and mobile apps. This trend has been picked up by Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, and Youtube, among others.
If you're not sure whether you should do the same, this article can help. A basic roadmap for creating a successful app or a useful addition to an existing app is also included.
How Can Real-Time Video Streaming Help Your Company Grow?
Companies and entrepreneurs can use live streaming technology to stay in touch with their followers and friends in real time, providing exclusive content instead of obnoxious advertisements. Inbound marketing can be taken to new heights with live video streams. Small businesses and individuals can afford them because of the low cost.
Real-time video streaming can be beneficial in a variety of situations:
Twitch is the world's largest and most popular gaming live video streaming platform. Video game fans can either watch others play their favorite games or stream their own video content. Live video streaming allows online daters to connect virtually before meeting in person.
Momo, a Chinese dating app, grew rapidly after adding the feature in 2015. It made $406.9 million in revenue from its live video service in the third quarter of 2018. (If you're still stumped as to how to make an app that's better than Tinder, the answer is probably 'Let them go live!')
Retail: In this industry, the visual appeal of goods plays a big role in marketing. A real-time demonstration of, say, luxury clothing details can be very appealing. A live-streamed product launch is a great place to start. Allowing customers to make purchases while watching live video streams can help retailers increase sales.
Real estate: Live streaming can be used to show potential buyers properties. Users can get information about their location, neighbors, insurance, taxes, and more without leaving the company's app.
Webinars: Live video streams are a great way to spice up your business presentations. They shorten the gap between the seller and the buyer. This is especially useful for businesses that do not deal directly with the public. Most B2B businesses require a platform to conduct online consultations or Q&A sessions, share materials, and receive immediate feedback from customers.
Healthcare: Live video streaming technology can help with patient support, intern education and training, team meetings, interviews, and presentations, among other things.
Companies can control the delivery process by using live video streaming services. A webcam installed in the luggage compartment of a truck would broadcast video to shipping agents, customers, and other stakeholders. Such an app will benefit from geolocation and IoT integration.
How to Make a Successful Live Streaming App with features.
Step 1: Create a live-streaming feature or app.
We can see events through the eyes of the broadcaster thanks to live streaming technology. This allows for almost complete interaction online, erasing geographical barriers. Consider who requires the skill, why they require it, and how they will use it. Focus on meeting the needs of viewers and broadcasters. Every aspect of the development of a video streaming app like netflix clone must contribute to those goals.
Test your app with a sufficient number of potential users before releasing it. This should provide the most useful feedback on what needs to be improved.
Step 2: Provide the Most Important Live Video Streaming App Features
A live video streaming app must have the following features:
Functionalities for video streaming and playback include: Your mobile application's MVP, or first version, may be limited to online streaming and real-time video viewing. The majority of popular applications, on the other hand, support streaming video playback. After the broadcast, viewers should be able to watch and possibly save the videos in subsequent versions.
Personal Accounts: The service must cater to specific profiles. Users should be able to create personal accounts, possibly with multiple user profiles, and manage their personal information, email addresses, passwords, and payment options. Allow users to subscribe to broadcasters and find profiles with similar interests.
Filters and searches that are effective help deliver the right content to each user. Provide a quick search for broadcasts based on their location. Users should be able to quickly find content they've already seen and enjoyed, as well as recommended broadcasts, if applicable.
Provide a way for broadcasters and viewers to leave comments. Live streams and saved videos should allow viewers to rate and/or react emotionally. Use messaging, live polling, user stats, in-app purchases, animations, and other methods to keep users engaged.
Viewers should be able to share interesting content and broadcasters with others via social media. Add one-click sharing to your app by integrating it with Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms.
Payment Methods: For web and mobile apps, live video streaming services, especially those targeting different regions, should offer a variety of payment options, including credit cards, debit cards, special-use cards, and prepaid credit cards.
Step 4. Ensure Proper User Experience (UX)
From the menu structure to the stream video speed and quality, pay attention to how viewers want to navigate your app's content. Keep in mind that ads are an important part of the user experience.
Users should be able to watch video content with just a single click on the homepage. Auto-playing on start, continuous playback, the ability to restrict access to video, pause and rewind the broadcast, push alerts, picture-in-picture mode or a background mode, download capabilities, and more are all useful features to consider.
Before implementing any feature, app developers should evaluate the functionality's future usage vs. the cost.
It makes sense for an MVP to focus on priority platforms, but viewers expect to be able to access content across a wide range of mobile devices and screens. Multiplatform adoption is a strategy for reaching audiences on Android and iOS phones and tablets, as well as Apple TV, Roku, Windows, and other devices.
App developers can use big data to improve the user experience by displaying personalized suggestions and delivering content in a personalized manner. Artificial intelligence can aid in the development of models based on demographic data. It allows you to segment your delivery and offer different experiences to different user types.
The term "quality of service" can refer to a variety of aspects of content delivery, including compression, transmission, delivery, and playback. The technological stack is largely responsible for these.
Step 5: Employ the Suitable Technology
The basis for developing a mobile video streaming app is the ability to:
Video/audio capture, compression, packing, and transmission to the streaming server.
On the server side, processing, storing, re-encoding, and other operations for incoming streams are performed according to business logic.
Providing the stream to viewers, either directly or through an intermediary storage system. (The latter necessitates the use of a platform for streaming video but provides more opportunities for marketing research and audience coverage evaluation.)
Prior to designing the system, it's critical to choose a streaming protocol. For live broadcasting, the Real Time Messaging Protocol is the most powerful and optimized protocol. (An earlier post contains more information on RTMP, including Onix's external library for Android.)
The good news is that adding live streaming to your platform doesn't require app developers to start from scratch or overhaul an existing tech stack.
You can use a live streaming platform like Brightcove, Contus VPlay, DaCast, JW Live, Livestream, UStream, or Wowza, or you can buy a ready-made framework. Contus VPlay is arguably the best solution for creating Android and iOS live video streaming apps.
Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Cloud Services are used by the majority of live streaming apps. For guaranteed fast delivery of content to viewers, more servers and channels are required as your audience grows.
File processing can be sped up using content delivery networks (CDNs) like Amazon CloudFront, Cloudflare, Fastly, or Open Connect. CDNs deliver content to the right user at the right time, with no buffering. They have a strong resistance to DDoS attacks and increased fault tolerance to boot.
C++, Go, HTML5/CSS3, Java, JavaScript (AngularJS, Backbone, EmberJS, Node.js, React, Restify, and RxJS), Python, and Ruby on Rails are some of the programming languages and frameworks used in live video streaming app development.
App developers and publishers should leverage extensive analytics suites run across the entire application. ComScore, Conviva, and Nielsen are major video streaming-specific analytics packages in addition to Google Analytics, MixPanel, Hadoop MapReduce, and Spark.
Conclusion
In video marketing, live video streams are becoming increasingly popular. The addition of new interactive video content to your platform can boost dwell time and incremental repeat traffic, resulting in increased advertising and revenue opportunities.
There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to live streaming. Live video streaming, on the other hand, can be a fantastic growth engine if the functionality is useful, intelligently integrated into the system, and supported by unobtrusive monetization methods.
Businesses are putting a lot of money into social media platforms, messaging apps, and IoT solutions. Leaders choose to create their own channels rather than compete for consumers' attention on others' channels. The development of a live video streaming app could be your best decision ever if you have a compelling consumer proposition.
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