Doors opens virtual venue for artists to connect with audiences on Amazon IVS

Music streaming service delivers high quality, low latency video at scale

Sweden-based company Doors is reimagining the virtual concert experience with a new streaming service that delivers high quality, low latency video, connecting artists and audiences in a new, intimate way. Built on top of AWS, the Doors service features Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) at its core, enabling it to help artists offer premium ticketed online concerts.

“With Doors, we were looking to create live shared moments between artists and their audiences, but in order to do that, we needed an ultra-low latency solution. That real-time interaction is fundamental to our platform and fortunately Amazon IVS launched just when we were looking at how we were going to achieve the low latency this requires. It’s amazing because it’s a complete, ready-to-use solution so we could quickly start building on top of it. Amazon IVS has enabled our entire product,” said Carl Rung, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Doors.

Many professional musicians pursue their artistic path out of a love of performing, and the exhilaration that comes with appearing on stage in front of an enthusiastic crowd. With the global pandemic unfolding throughout 2020 and beyond, artists have largely been unable to perform live in large venues due to safety protocols, which has led to new approaches to reach and engage with fans. Artists have staged virtual performances using standard video conferencing tools though the resulting efforts lack dimension and interactivity. Instead of merely replacing the audience with a camera, Doors explores a new category of artistic expression, according to Rung.

Development for Doors kicked into high gear in summer 2020, with Amazon IVS as a key building block along with Stripe for ticketing. Within weeks, the company had a functioning prototype and began looking at adding other features like tokenization, which it handles through Amazon IVS. After refining its service in beta running events for select partner artists, the Doors team is now broadening functionality, drawing from what it has learned so far to further optimize streams and enhance the experience on both ends.

“Our platform stands for very high-level video and audio quality, and knowing that we can always deliver that with Amazon IVS warms my tech heart. For us, it’s all about streaming as close to real time as possible, and I’ve heard from several broadcast industry professionals that our quality is unmatched,” explained Rung. “We built our own telemetry service on top of AWS that receives quality-of-service data from those participating in the live stream, so if issues do arise, we can review things like latency and adapted bitrate data and pinpoint what happened. Having this data has been very helpful from both a technical and content formatting perspective.”

Though launched during a time when in-person concert viewing is significantly limited, Doors’ vision is to help widen the path artists follow to reach audiences. Noted Rung, “I think we’re all looking forward to going back to see live concerts in person, but part of the beauty of Doors is that it’s designed to coexist with those experiences. With the scalability of AWS, we can welcome high profile artists with massive followings, but at the same time help niche artists with a global audience reach their fanbase, whether they’re tuning into a performance that’s relatively local or happening across the world.”

As Doors continues to evolve, the company anticipates deepening the service’s collaboration functionality, further equipping its creative toolbox for artists. Concluded Rung, “Reliability is so important. When we’re meeting with large umbrella organizations that manage rosters of superstar artists, they need to feel confident that we will deliver the virtual concert experience as expected, and AWS provides that backing. It’s so nice to know that we can rise to whatever the challenge may be, especially as we grow and further leverage AWS.”

For more information building engaging streaming experiences with Amazon IVS, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ivs/