In an earlier article about building video streaming applications, we talked about some of the technical considerations involved in the process of media streaming service development from scratch. We also mentioned that it's possible to simplify the process and create low-latency, high quality video experiences with managed solutions like Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS). In this article, we discuss eight different use cases of Amazon IVS to demonstrate the potential of this technology.
Let’s dig in!
What is Amazon IVS?
Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS) is a fully managed service that makes it easy to create, launch, and scale live video streaming. With IVS, you can stream live video content to a global audience with low latency and high reliability, and use a range of built-in features such as real-time analytics, ad integration, and closed captioning. Some common use cases for Amazon IVS include live events, gaming and e-sports, education and training, and remote interviews. Additionally, you can use IVS to stream live video to other platforms, such as YouTube and Facebook.
Use case 1: Building communities with chat rooms
Amazon IVS features a Chat component that supports relationship-building between streamers and viewers. The innovative chat feature offers comprehensive chat room management as well as a messaging API for sending, receiving, and moderating messages, as well as an SDK for developing your own client-side messaging applications.
With Amazon IVS Chat, users can manage the chat infrastructure and create reliable and engaging experiences. They also gain tokenized access to manage user authentication and authorization. Furthermore, Amazon IVS Chat features moderation APIs that can block content and disconnect users, ensuring a safe user experience.
Use case 2: Monetizing ecommerce livestreams
Indeed, enterprises can build robust transmission services with Amazon IVS. BeLive is a provider of live streaming services from Singapore. It has provided more than 50 million hours of live video since 2018 and relies on Amazon IVS for low-latency, high-quality streaming that helps solve their clients’ business challenges.
BeLive leverages AWS Media Services for video-on-demand content delivery, Amazon CloudFront for playback and recording, and Amazon S3 for storage. Additionally, they are integrating IVS analytics into their builds, providing customers with hard data on how to improve their streams and draw and grow audiences.
Use case 3: Gauging audience’s opinion
Organizations that want to increase engagement and customer retention can certainly benefit from Amazon IVS timed metadata feature available in live streams. It can be applied in polling applications to engage viewers and encourage them to participate in the live stream, or to create interactive experiences, such as quizzes and games, which can be used to entertain and expand the audience.
Timed metadata also allows for real-time feedback from viewers, which can be used to gauge audience sentiment and make adjustments to the live stream on the fly. Organizations can apply them to understand the audience better, as it allows to gather data on the likes and dislikes of the viewers, which can be used to tailor the content to the audience's preferences.
Finally, they can also be used to segment the audience and gather data on specific groups of viewers, such as demographics or interests.
Use case 4: Providing real-time Q&As
With Amazon IVS, it's possible to create interactive chat environments where viewers can ask questions in real time and receive answers on the spot. This makes it easy to facilitate conversations, build trivia applications, or simply allow viewers to engage more deeply with the content. Additionally, Amazon IVS can be used with live video, allowing viewers to ask questions and receive responses in real-time as they watch your streams.
Real-time Q&As can be applied in virtually any industry. Tech companies often use this tool in their live streams to answer questions about their products and services, and to gather feedback from customers. Educational institutions like Coursera and Skillshare use the solution to answer questions from students and to provide interactive learning experiences. Similarly, media and entertainment companies, retail, the financial sector and the government can use real-time Q&As to connect with their respective audiences.
Use case 5: Increasing followers with livestreams
GoPro has built an excellent case for allowing its user to increase their fanbase through live streaming! The camera, software and lifestyle gear producer not only helps its customers capture and share their content, but it also enables its subscribers to live stream directly to their social media accounts and gopro.com.
The company incorporated Amazon IVS into its Quik App. This simple streaming solution does not require a third-party channel and viewers can access the livestream with a single click. It’s a great way to enable access to events to those who cannot attend them in person.
Use case 6: Enabling live streaming of interactive videos
DeNA, a Tokyo-based technology developer, was on a mission to allow users to easily view or capture and stream interactive, customizable live videos - they’re a true pioneer on the Japanese market. DeNA adopted Amazon IVS to power its Pococha social live streaming community. The managed solution provides high video quality, broadcast stability, scalability, and the ability to quickly spin up new video channels.
Amazon IVS also helps Pococha by managing the recording and storage of livestreams, and by providing straightforward APIs to enhance user-oriented functions and interactivity. The migration to Amazon IVS has reduced downtime, and made it easier for developers to introduce new integrations.
Use case 7: Decreasing database and cache latency
While Amazon IVS can help you expand your live video streaming capabilities, it can also be used to decrease database and cache latency. As the demand for virtual events skyrocketed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hopin, a leading shared experiences solution, had to scale quickly in order to meet the needs of their 100,000 customers. To do this, they turned to Amazon IVS when their previous cloud vendor couldn’t cope with such increased demand.
With this change, Hopin has improved scalability and reliability, increased event capacities, and reduced database and cache latency by around 20 percent. Amazon IVS has enabled Hopin to expand into new regions where they provide event organizers with the technology needed to engage with virtual or hybrid audiences. They were able to unlock revenue-driving offers that helped the company to expand from a team of eight to a fully remote company of over 1,000 employees in just two years!
Use case 8: Providing virtual video instruction at scale
Amid the global pandemic, many organizations had to suddenly embrace remote connections in a variety of ways. Educational institutions had to adapt to distance learning at scale. In response to those needs, Blackboard released the Blackboard Interactive Video Service Integration (BIVSI), a workflow built to support live event video streams that is based on the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard protocol and Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS).
BIVSI is designed to make it easier for educators to deliver high-quality video instruction and virtual events, and it is available to institutions around the world - Blackboard has made the solution free and open source in order to broaden access to it and support distance learning programs. It was met with positive feedback from students who noted that accessing and watching high-quality streams became easy.
Build an interactive live video app with Amazon IVS and RST Software
As a certified AWS Partner, we have helped our customers build multiple projects on Amazon products, including the Interactive Video Service. Whether you want to build a media streaming service, a chat application, a location based service with an interactive video feature or any other application that would help you interact with your audience through live video, we’d be happy to put our AWS expertise into practice. Contact me directly at magda@rst.software and I’ll put you in touch with one of our experts best suited for the task.
