Creating a Live Auction Web App with Amazon IVS

We have noticed a shift from traditional marketing to using online streamers and content creators to market products. These content creators have multiple sources of revenue, such as ads and product sponsorship. We believe there is another way of engaging with audiences to drive revenue. It can be done by running online auctions to sell one-of-a-kind products. The challenge with an online auction is recreating the real-life experience of the frenzy of bidding against a large group of people.

To solve this problem we decided to use Amazon’s Interactive Video Service (IVS) and the related Chat API. In this post, we will walk you through a demo of the application and talk about the high-level architecture of the product, the benefits of the IVS, and the Chat API.

Application Demo

After the stream has started, the streamer has the opportunity to start an auction. As soon as they start an auction all the viewers are notified and bidding is open. Users can watch a stream and auction without logging in. If they are signed up and logged in, they can participate in the auction by bidding. When the auction ends they are notified about the results.

Amazon IVS

Amazon IVS is a low latency video streaming service built on the same infrastructure as Twitch.tv! Streamers can simply set up their camera attached to their laptop, and broadcast from their browser or use applications like OBS to broadcast.

The Interactive Video Streaming service is easy to set up:

• Create a channel
• Include a player in your application to view the stream using the Playback URL of your channel.
• As a streamer, you can broadcast your stream from your browser or by using an application like OBS that requires the ingest server URL and stream key.

There is no:

• Complex infrastructure setup
• Video processing work
• Video distribution work

Chat API

The Chat API provided by IVS allows for real-time text-based communication. When streamers filled out the details to start an auction, the Chat API was used to deliver that information to all the viewers. When the viewers placed bids the Chat API was used to transmit that information to the Streamer to process.

The Chat API is built using web-socket technology. All that needs to be done to use the API is:

• Create a chat room
• Get the Chat Token
• Use the Chat API SDK to send and receive messages

There is no:

• Complex infrastructure setup
• Work done to scale the web socket connections used for real-time communication

It works out of the box!

High-level Architecture

Our team spent 5 weeks from conception to building out the finished product. All our infrastructure is hosted on AWS. These are some of the other services we use for this project:

• AWS Cognito for authentication
• Amazon Relational Database Services for storage
• Amazon Fargate to host our website and APIs
• Amazon CodeBuild for Continous Integration and Deployment
• CloudWatch for Logging

We built out all the infrastructure using the Cloud Development Kit, to create consistency when building test and production environments. It took minutes to spin up and tear down environments by running the scripts. Additionally, all testing and deployment were automated which freed up resources to work on other features.

At Four Nine Digital, we are passionate about Technology and Design because we believe that the world can be both efficient and beautiful. By focusing on the user, having time-tested processes, and strong collaboration we build applications and websites that make a difference.

If you would like to learn more about us, visit our website or email us at: info@fournine.digital