Website Development: Developing a live streaming website

After the pandemic live streaming website became more popular than before. It makes everything much easier for the content creator, event organizer, and so on to reach more influencers within a short time and get profit for a lifetime! Before live streaming websites became popular it was not that easy to create a feed or stream content.

The live stream became this much popular, you may expect that it will be a $1000.10 billion worth industry within the next few years. So, after seeing this a question came to your mind – how you will make your own live streaming website and not fail.

In this post, I’ll try to share all the must-have features, tech stack, and cost to building up a live streaming website and without any fail!

Choose your platform: Every single live streaming website is built on a platform. Behind this have lots of functionalities which makes everything work perfectly. According to your plan may divide them into three-part. Like if you have technical knowledge of how it works and the functionalities then you may do it by yourself. And if you don’t have any technical idea and have enough cash to spend, you may hire a developer and develop a platform as you wish. Or may use any video monetization platform.

Monetizing website: For monetizing your streaming website successfully, you will be needed to consider the business model in addition to good content. According to your need, you may categorize the strategies into five primary sections. 

01. Subscription: A payment that will be paid by the user at the time of opening their account.

02. Freemium: Should give free access to a few contents to attract the user to be with your platform, while there is an additional payment for exclusive content.

03. Advertising: There are lots of streaming platform that follow the advertising model to generate revenue and cover their expenses.

04. Ad-blocking: May add an option for blocking add by giving an additional price.

05. Affiliate program: Along with other models may include an affiliate program too, with that users will be able to generate revenue and you will get more influencers through an affiliation program.

Business model: Your steaming site will gonna be a product or an asset for you. So before developing and thinking of how you will gonna develop then should think about the model of your business. There is two business model to reach your audience and those are..

01. Transactional video on demand (TVOD): According to this model, to get access to an individual section user pays a monthly subscription. 

02. Subscription video on demand (SVOD): According to this model, to get access to all sections user pays a monthly subscription.

It will be better to go with SVOD. Because it attracts the audience more as for being cost-effective. 

Must have features: There are various types of streaming websites and they have lots of features. To build up yours may classify them according to your purpose and it can be divided to.

01. Essential 

02. Advance

Essential features cover all the functionality needed to satisfy the user’s expectations. Initially, you may go with it and after that may upgrade and add some features. By going with this process at the time of development will save your money and time too. 

On essential features, you can add.

SignUp

Free trial offer

Adding personal data

Start/Finish broadcast

Real-time chat

Follower

Streamer

Paywall

Following streamer 

Search for streamer 

Other essential settings

Except for all the mentioned features, to manage your website there will need an admin panel and should be easy to use with an eye-catching UI design. 

For advanced features, you may include.

Top trending broadcasters

Brand promotion

Event management/Advertisement

Nearby broadcasters

After all these, now you will be needed to focus on the tech stack to develop your streaming website. You may do it by a skilled person whose have all the required qualification or with a company. Among all the required sections I’ve listed a few core points and those are.

01. Business analyst

02. Project manager

03. UI/UX designer

04. Front-end developer

05. Back-end developer

06. QA engineer

07. Marketing team

To develop a streaming website there are various tools and technologies on the market. I’m mentioning a few hints below.

Front-end part based on the following technology stack:

Markup languages: HTML5, CSS3

Programming languages: JavaScript, TypeScript

JavaScript framework: Angular 6.x+, Node.js, React

Compatibility: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Edge

Back-end part based on the following technologies:

Programming language: Ruby

Web framework: Ruby on Rails (5.2)

Database server: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB

Web servers: Nginx

Cloud server platform: Amazon EC2, Amazon S3

Analytics: Google Mobile App Analytics, Flurry Analytics, Hadoop, Hive, MixPanel, Localytics, Mode, Parquet, Pig, Presto, Spark

CDN services: Amazon CloudFront

Streaming protocols: RTMP, Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming, Apple HTTP Live Streaming, M2TS, MPEG-DASH, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, WebRTC, RTSP/RTP

Media formats: MKV, MP4, AVCHD, AVI, DMW, MOV, FLV, WMV, SWF.

Codecs: H.264/AVC, FFmpeg, XviD

Media containers: MP4, FLV

Chat: Twilio

Licensing all the content: Every business should have a law or privacy policy. To be the first step on the road to its creation, registering the business legally will be helpful. And then the second part could be adding a copyright policy for the creator of their uploaded content.

So hope all the mentioned above steps will be helpful for you to take further decisions if you are thinking about building up a streaming plug platform.