Chime SDK Now Makes it Easier and Faster to Add Live Streaming for Mobile and Web Apps

With the rise of Twitch and other real-time video platforms, live streaming has grown significantly in the past five years as a way for organizations to drive higher engagement with viewers, employees, and customers. However, to send real-time video from apps to streaming platforms, developers need to either use legacy products or build custom solutions. Legacy products provide limited scalability and don’t provide native streaming of video from apps. Building custom solutions is time consuming and complex—requiring developers to write a lot of code for processing video, managing infrastructure, and securely sending video in a format that can be ingested by the streaming platform.

That’s why, today, we’re proud to announce the general availability of live connector, a new feature of Amazon Chime SDK. Live connector makes it easier and faster to add live streaming to web and mobile apps and reach millions of viewers by sending real-time video to streaming platforms. Using live connector, developers can create and send a video stream from a multi-party video session to streaming platforms for distribution to a global audience. Developers can enhance the live streaming experience by formatting video layouts, choosing and combining multiple video streams into a single stream, and using machine learning (ML) to uplift audio and video quality. Video streams can be captured into a single file for video on demand (VoD) playback, offline consumption, or archiving. Developers can use live connector to broadcast virtual events, webinars, education classes, fitness sessions, product demos for live commerce, online games, and sports.

About Amazon Chime SDK live connector:

Live connector makes it easy for developers to livestream multi-party video sessions by securely sending video from apps to streaming platforms with just a few lines of code. Developers can create an output video stream within minutes from their apps in Real-Time Messaging Protocol Secure (RTMPS) format that can be ingested by streaming platforms. Developers can have customers watch the livestream either within their apps itself or in social media platforms. For example, developers building virtual event apps can use live connector in conjunction with Amazon IVS to have customers watch events in real-time within their app. Audio and video are synced since both streams are captured in real-time for each attendee in an Amazon Chime SDK meeting. Live connector is built on AWS infrastructure and elastically scales in a cost-effective manner. VoD files are automatically created after the completion of the video session in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket designated by the developer. Native ML services from Amazon Chime SDK reduce background noise and echo without having the developers to use third-party apps.

“At MICE Platform Co.,Ltd, we want our events to reach the broadest audience possible, while still delivering a best-in-class event experience. Building live stream event experiences can be difficult and time intensive, requiring specialized software that can be difficult for presenters to install and manage,” said Tsuyoshi Suzuki, chief technology officer, MICE Platform Co.,Ltd. “We have implemented the Amazon Chime SDK live connector so that multiple remote speakers can join to present together seamlessly, and without the need for special software. With live connector, it’s easy for us to send video to Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS) to stream the meeting, so thousands of viewers can attend the event. We love that this feature makes presenting easier for our special guests while simultaneously making it simple to reach a large audience.”

To learn more about how to deploy live connector, visit https://aws.amazon.com/chime/chime-sdk