How Live Media As A Service Drastically Reduces Development Costs

With the rise of virtual experiences, even after COVID-19 ends and society returns to “normal”, pandora’s box for what is socially acceptable virtually has been opened. Jobs will remain remote, Telehealth will persist, education will still be online, and many more use cases will arise.

What all of these have in common is they will utilize live media for communication. Live media at its core can be video, audio, or virtual reality. In many cases, live media will have augmented experiences that are interactive and immersive. The problem is developing these solutions can often be time-consuming, difficult to understand the protocols, and hard to scale. This is where the rise of Live Media as a Service (LMAAS) will be vital.

Live MediaAs A Service (LMAAS) is part of cloud computing, where the essential components of live media are centralized and delivered to the end-user as a service. It will often be on a subscription model, and delivered over the internet. This article will cover deeper insights into understanding LMAAS in these areas:

1. What Is and Is Not Live Media
2. What Kind Of Use Cases LMAAS Will Be Used For
3. The Development Benefits of LMAAS
4. LMAAS Companies To Watch

What Is and Is Not Live Media

The media market is huge and often can be confusing on what is and is not live video. Live media is when media is delivered in real-time to the end-user. It is NOT on-demand when users can watch content whenever they want. To highlight services that use live media, think of the following services:

To understand the services that are NOT live media, think of these services below:

What is very important to understand is that live media and on-demand services are entirely different from a technical perspective. Each one uses different protocols and faces unique challenges, such as how it scales and infrastructure cost, which will be discussed later in this article.

Live media can be further broken down into four different types:

1. Live Streaming: Live streaming is when content is broadcasted to a large group of users, for example, Youtube Live.
2. Video Conferencing: Video conferencing is when multiple users talk with each other, for example, Google Hangouts.
3. Audio Conferencing: Audio conferencing is when just audio is used to the setup.
4. Interactive Sessions: Interactive sessions is when users can engage with each other in real-time.

Each of those requires a unique technical setup to execute correctly. Next, we will cover the use cases for live experiences and why LMAAS will be important in the future.

The Use Cases Of Live Media Now And The Future

The most important question to answer about LMAAS is why anyone should care. Cool technology without any use cases or value is not something worth investing in. Live media is rapidly growing, and looking at the trending data, it will continue to expand in its usage. The video below from Statista gives a great overview of live video as one of the forms of live media and its massive growth:

The current problem for businesses and live media solutions is they are generic in their toolset and cannot be extended to fit unique use cases. The limitations will not satisfy organizations will want live media solutions that:

1. Have custom features specifically for the experience they want for their end-users
2. Have complete control of design and branding while using their own apps and/or website features.
3. Own and control all the data associated with their apps.

Use cases can be from fun stuff to important business workflow solutions.

Examples can include but are not limited to:

• Live cooking classes
• Hybrid concerts
• Broadcasting sporting events
• Real-Time Film Events
• Interactive Education
• Live Shopping
• Sales CRM with Live Calls

There are many use cases not listed here for live media that creative companies and individual will implement over the coming years. The is what will continue to fuel the growth of the trend and why LMAAS will increase in importance.

The Development Benefits of LMAAS

To understand why LMAAS is valuable, there has to be knowledge of what goes into developing a live media and immersive experience. During the pandemic, many unique startups such as Clubhouse, Hop-In, and Gather.Town grew rapidly. Underneath the hood, the emerging companies mentioned above are likely using a service that powers their live sessions. For new companies that want to build unique experiences, they will have to think about their technical requirements.

Developing a scalable live media infrastructure is hard and often out of scope for both small and big companies to create from scratch and maintain. The technologies and infrastructure of live experiences can be broken into several different parts:

1. Networking: Delivering live content quickly and reliability to an end-user over a network.
2. Server: Server(s) includes virtualization and entails the hardware, the operating system, and its programs (ie: web servers, FFMPEg, etc.).
3. Scaling: Scaling is how the servers will handle large loads of end-users across the world.
4. Data: Data is information obtained, stored, and utilized on the service. Live has a special requirement in the data is in real-time.
5. Protocols: In a live media, this often refers low-latency protocols such as WebRTC, RTMP, DASH and HLS.
6. Application: The application is utilized by the end-user when viewing live video.

Each one of the areas has its own complexity and cost associated with it and requires a development team to implement live media correctly. The complexity is prohibitive for small organizations to develop their own live video solutions and a huge investment for large organizations that might not be mission-critical.

The difference in the amount of technical requirements need for using an LMAAS vs not using one will be obvious:

LMAAS will be important because it will drastically lower all barriers to developing live media applications. An organization will be able to hire fewer developers (or none all if no-coded) and be able to bring custom solutions to market faster.

LMAAS Companies To Watch

LMAAS is a very new concept and one of the emerging technology types in SAAS. Here is a short list of unique LMAAS companies to look at, depending on your live media requirements.

BingeWave

BingeWave LMAAS that is funded by HustleFund and Google. BingeWave focuses on creating interactive and immersive experiences in video conferencing, live streaming, and augmented reality. The service integrates into both mobile apps and websites with only a few lines of codes. The service is easy to extend and customize through its widget system in which organizations can make and deploy their own apps. There is also a developers marketplace in which developers can sell their widgets for others to use.

Website: https://www.bingewave.com/

Hyperbeam

Hybperbeam is a Y-Combinator backed company that creates interactive browsing experiences. Hyperbeam lets you share a multiplayer web browser with everyone in your (virtual) room, where you can visit almost any website and pass control of the browser to anyone.

Website: https://hyperbeam.com/

HearMeCheer

Hear Me Cheer , backed by HustleFund, is real-time audio engine will enhance the connection between people on any app/platform that looks to provide conversation and community among its users. Their social audio widget can be overlayed on any platform/app/website in about 15 minutes using our iFrame, allowing users additional ways to connect and engage with each other. They also offer a full API for deeper integration solutions.

Website: https://hearmecheer.com/