How to build a Live Streaming app — Product, Monetization, Tech, Features & Costs

Live-streaming apps

The live video streaming market is expected to hit $70 billion in 2021 as shown in a study from 2016. Video content is the king nowadays, with more than 80% of US users preferring to watch a video than read a blog post or article, in addition to this, the viewing rate of videos is 10–20 times higher for live content than for prerecorded, on-demand one.

Smartphones are our most personal devices, and they have great hardware capabilities for creating, streaming and watching live video content. Today we are going to talk about the technology behind live-streaming apps, what should you consider if you want to solve a problem through live-streaming and what are the costs of developing such an app.

How to build a live-streaming app MVP?

Product

Never building on assumptions is our mantra at appssemble, before building a product it’s important to understand what’s its purpose, and the business model around it.

It’s important to conduct surveys and talk to the users before building a product, that is why we encourage you to conduct a free Discovery session and a Design Sprint before developing the product.

Experience

When building an MVP, the focus is on the core of the product, the main feature only, but that core needs to function remarkably well. When building a streaming app, there are a couple of things that make the live-streaming experience a pleasant one:

• The content needs to be available instantly, and the streams must have as little delay as possible
• Streaming content should not consume too many network resources — the internet is not cheap in many countries, especially the one from carrier providers, when building a streaming app you should make sure you’re not using more bandwidth than you’re needing
• Streaming or watching a video should not drain the battery — unfortunately, this is the case with many apps where streaming, encoding, or decoding live video takes a big toll on the energy efficiency of the devices it runs on
• Privacy — We are strong advocates of privacy, the content of the user should be his own, and have full control over it
• Last but not least, the UX/UI represents a major part in the success of the app, the flow of the user as well as how it interacts with the content can be a deal-maker or breaker.

Technology

The most popular live video streaming protocols are WebRTC and RTMP/S each with its own strong and weak points.

When developing an MVP what we usually recommend is going with a third-party service provider for the first iteration of MVP, to test the market, user engagement, acquisition, etc., and if the product is successful move onto a custom solution with lower operational costs.

WebRTC in mobile apps

This technology allows for an extra layer of privacy as the connection (if possible) is made directly between the users involved in the communication, meaning the video goes straight from user A to user B without using an intermediate server, which results in lower latency, and lower operational costs. In cases where this approach fails, a relay server is used as a middleman for communication.

Pros

• Lower operational costs
• Increased privacy
• Low latency

Cons

• Does not work well for more than 5 users on mobile devices — in general, it should be used for apps where communication is restricted to a low number of users, or when only a video feed is sent (the presenter sends the video to all the participants, the participants are only watchers).

RTMP / RTMPS in mobile apps

This protocol is the most used for high-definition streaming, where a delay of 10–15 seconds (from the moment when it was streamed to when the user sees it) is acceptable, this is used for instance when streaming a conference, a sporting event, or a concert in which there is no real-time interaction with the viewers (only trough messages, and other means different from video).

Pros

• High-quality videos, that can be modified (eq. applying watermarks)
• Supports a large number of users — it can be scaled to any number of watchers
• Videos can be stored and viewed on-demand after the stream has ended

Cons

• Usage of third parties for communication
• A delay of 10–15 seconds
• Does not support real-time communication for all the users involved in the conversation.

Features & Costs

Every MVP is different in its way, compiling a definitive set of features for a live-streaming MVP is not possible, but many of the mobile apps which have streaming as their main component have some of the following features

• User registration / login
• User profile
• A list of streamers/feeds and the ability to search or filter them
• Streaming or watching a live stream
• Subscription mechanism
• Notifications

The price of the project includes manual QA, development, and project management needed for one platform (iOS or Android).

We have a wide experience in building streaming applications, our technologies are used by Bosch, Honda, and a lot of developers through our free SDKs.

If you’re looking for a partner for building a great streaming app, get in touch and let us guide you through the process. Drop us an email, and let’s discuss more!