DeNA relies on Amazon IVS for end-to-end live stream management

Tokyo-based technology developer DeNA (pronounced DNA) aims to entertain and to serve through their businesses, under their mission to delight people beyond their wildest dreams. A pioneer in the Japanese live streaming market, DeNA’s Pococha social live streaming community excels at this, allowing users to easily view or capture and stream interactive, customizable live videos. An early adopter of Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS), Pococha leverages the managed live streaming solution to power interactive video experiences for users across the platform, freeing the company to focus development efforts on providing an unparalleled experience that celebrates individuality and real-time connections.

“As Amazon IVS is able to deliver both high video quality and broadcast stability to our platform, we can allocate our resources to focus on important work for our core business,” said Daisuke Mizuta, producer of Pococha at DeNA. “Amazon IVS also provides additional stability for Pococha by scaling instantly in response to unpredictable user traffic spikes.”

Built to connect people through shared moments, Pococha allows users to spin up new video channels and start streaming in less than one second. On the backend, Amazon IVS manages the complete video infrastructure, and with the highly available compute resources of Amazon Web Services (AWS), ensures a low-latency experience for viewers. For each new stream, Amazon IVS is called from a Rails application development framework on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Broadcast recordings are then managed using AWS Lambda serverless compute and Amazon EventBridge, while Amazon CloudWatch monitoring ensures the Pococha team is quickly notified of any system issues so that they can take immediate action. Previously, the service used on-premises servers and streaming software to build livestreams, which proved limiting. Mizuta explained, “As our business is rapidly growing, it is a big benefit for us to leave important quality control monitoring to Amazon IVS.”

In addition to its core livestreaming functionality, Amazon IVS has also proven valuable for its recording capabilities, which allow Pococha to reach a broader audience by allowing users to view content on-demand as well as live. “The Amazon IVS recording feature is very stable and enables us to save all broadcasts to Amazon S3, which has intelligent storage tiering and allows us to set time limits on livestreams,” noted Mizuta. “Since all the streamed content is available for viewing immediately after the stream, more viewers can get access to the video.”

The migration to Amazon IVS has also reduced the need for sharding at the application level, reducing downtime caused by parameter changes. Additionally, with straightforward APIs, Amazon IVS allows Pococha developers to easily enhance user-oriented functions and interactivity through new integrations, and its flexibility helped the service transition from RTMP to HLS-based streaming for better scalability as it continues to gain popularity in Japan and around the world. As the Amazon IVS feature set continues to evolve, the Pococha team looks forward to further augmenting its service with new offerings.

For more information about livestreaming with Amazon IVS, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ivs/