Whether the celebrities wish to connect with their fans, a traveller wants to show his journey to his loved ones, or an event manager needs to cast his show, a live streaming application is used in many purposes. A live streaming application has become a bridge between the influencers and their followers. You must have seen that many celebrities often go live on these live-streaming apps such as Facebook or Instagram where their fans can ask about them and make a better bonding. In this article, we will give you a complete guide of how to develop a live streaming app, how you can make money through it and many other useful things.
Streaming Applications Types
You can find many different types of streaming applications used by a variety of users. Hence, before developing a streaming app you should delve about the different types of it and decide which streaming application is your niche.
Live Broadcast Applications
This streaming application type is the most popular. In this application, the video is recorded and broadcasted at the same time just like a Live Cricket Match. You can develop a live broadcasting application in which a celebrity is answering questions of his fans, users playing games, travelers showing his journey etc. Some of the most popular examples of live broadcasting applications are Facebook Live, Instagram Live, YouTube Live, Livestream, Periscope etc.
Audio Streaming
Similar to video streaming applications, in an audio streaming application, the users can listen to music without downloading them. These are podcasts, radio channels, etc. Some of the most popular audio streaming applications are Pandora, Spotify, Apple Music.
Video On Demand Streaming application
A video-on-demand streaming application enables users to watch a television series or a movie without downloading it on their device. What makes them different from the above-mentioned Live Broadcast applications is that the users can pause, resume, and even seek the content and watch it whenever they wish. But also users have to pay a subscription fee to access this content. Some of the popular examples of Video-On-Demand Streaming apps are Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Hotstar.
TV Live Streaming application
In these streaming applications, the users can watch TV online. The video-on-demand streaming apps companies realize that users don’t want to miss their TV experience too hence they also integrate TV streaming on their apps too. Some of the best examples are Amazon Prime, YouTube TV, Hulu etc.
In this article, we would be focusing on Live broadcasting applications such as Instagram, Twitch, or Periscope.
Read more: Cost of Mobile App Maintenance in 2023 and Why It’s Needed
How to develop a Live Streaming application?
Now we would be focusing on the steps you will undergo while creating a Live Streaming application:
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A Content Delivery Network or CDN is a group of globally distributed servers whose purpose is to deliver faster content to the users. A high content loading speed emphasizes better user experience. If all the data of your application is located on the central server then the UX will impact negatively by slow loading speed as greater the distance between user and server lesser would be speed. But CDN improves the speed as it is distributed to different locations and delivers content to the nearby users.
Make use of reliable and fast hosting
Hosting also plays an important role while creating an application. To make sure that your app is working 24 x 7 without any glitch or faults, you should host your application on a reliable hosting. Initially hosting doesn’t seem so important but once it will get popular, there would be an increase in the number of users and a video would be watched by millions of users within a few hours.
To handle such traffic, you should have strong server infrastructure. The best option would be to use Amazon S3 services. But you can also consult the development team for other alternatives.
Storage
There would be a lot of content on a live streaming app. You need to save this content at a reliable place so that the users can watch it seamlessly without any distortion or failures. The cloud infrastructure is best for storing data of the live streaming app. Also, you have to pay only for the services you are using.
Captivating UI and UX Design
The first impression is the last impression. The users will use your app only when it is attractive to them and have a smooth user experience. For this, you have to hire a mobile app development company having an expert UI/UX designers team to build an interactive and attractive app. You can take the reference of your competitors’ app and find what is essential to implement on your app and take design references.
Include Essential Features
Before launching the complete application, it is best to first develop an MVP version of your app having all the basic and advanced features. If it gets success then you can move on to include a better version of your app with all features.
QA and Testing
Every person in the world makes mistakes. Same goes with our developers, that’s why a QA analysis or testing team is important. They will find the mistakes or bugs in the app so that they will get resolved and a customer receives a bug-free app. It is better to find mistakes before your users find them.
We are having a complete team of testing. Know our testing services here.
MVP Development of your app
Before investing a huge amount of money in your app it is best to test your idea with a basic version of your app which will require a lesser amount of money to invest. An MVP is a procedure in which initially the mobile app comes with essential features which are required to go live, and find out whether the user wants an updated and more sophisticated version of this app with additional features.
After getting the feedback from the users, you can decide what features you should add, what is not necessary, how to improve UI & UX etc.
Firstly you have to opt for a platform for app development. The app can be either a native application or a hybrid one. A native application is for a specific platform. The code written for that application runs only on that platform. While a hybrid application is supported by multiple platforms.
Focusing on native app development, it can be either Android, iOS or a web application. Now you need to include the essential features in your MVP application. Some of the commonly required features are:
- User login and Sign Up
- Profile creation
- Video Streaming
- Search and Filters
- Comments
These are the features by which you can initially begin the development of your app.
Want to know more about MVP Development. Know it here.
Features to include after MVP got success:
As you have got a positive response from your user base, now you can begin to create a better version of your app by including some advanced features.
Multiple Sign-Up options
In the MVP development, you can just include a basic sign up by entering the mail and password. But now you can also include multiple options of Sign-up such as sign up by contact number, and through social media options such as login through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Profile
In the advanced version of your app, you need to decide what personal information you will ask from your users. In MVP, you can just include Full name, profile picture, the username (if required), and subscription plans.
Later on, you can also include Date of birth, gender, location, interests, preferences etc. Personal information can also give you better analytics of your app.
Streaming
Streaming is the core functionality of your app. So you have to understand the complete concept of implementing Streaming on to your Live Streaming application.
Streaming means transmitting audio or video data from servers to users. There are various streaming protocols which make this possible such as RTMP (Real-time messaging protocol). In this protocol, a media player requests the server to make a connection, the server responds to this request and sends a video file back. The video file can be broadcasted to an unlimited number of users at the same time. The only prerequisite is high bandwidth.
For a better video streaming experience, you can also store the stream on server. You should also have larger storage.
Donation System
The donation system is another major way of making income through a live streaming app (apart from subscription fees). If viewers enjoy the live broadcast then they can support your app on a voluntary basis by a sum of money.
The best part of this system is that users can also give a message along with their donations so you can better interact with the users. You can use a 3rd party system for implementing a donation system.
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Chat
A chat feature is a highly required feature to connect the influencers with their followers during the live streaming. The streamers can communicate with their followers by chat. They can get the feedback, give an answer to their follower questions and whatnot.
Chat is also important for streamers as they can monetize it, because the streamer can encourage the users to subscribe to the application to have chat with them.
But it is not an easy functionality to implement. You need to protect chat from getting spam by inappropriate messages. This can hurt the feeling of a particular race or religion or also someone’s feelings. To avoid such scenarios, you can implement an automated moderating system which will keep the chat in order.
Video Streaming Quality
You can’t expect that all the users will have a very high-speed internet connection. So the app should adjust the video quality of the content as per the user internet connection. If a user has low-speed internet then the quality will get reduced and vice-versa.
Search
Search is an important functionality in every type of app. The users can browse through their favourite channels easily. The users just can’t depend on a single channel and hence will browse through other channels. So you must implement a smart search algorithm which can show the user suggestions of streaming on the basis of their location, interests, topic, language, popularity etc.
Sharing Screen
Nearly every online conferencing application has a screen sharing feature. An influencer genius or other entity can broadcast the image of his screen. It is highly useful to give technical tutorials or games.
Live Streaming Scheduling and Notifications
Live Streaming is spontaneous or either scheduled. You can’t get the content if you missed it. And suppose if it is a series or tutorial with multiple videos then missing a single session can impact the whole learning process. Henceforth, for a better user experience, you can implement scheduling and notifications at the time live streaming application development.
In fact, push notifications are a highly required feature in almost every time of application. The users can get updates such as news, events, etc. through push notifications.
Privacy
Even the influences, celebrities, and other famous people seek privacy. They may want personal space and ability to choose whom they will broadcast to. You can give the ability to the streamer to broadcast:
- For a single person
- A chosen list of users
- Only in a certain geographical location
How to make Money through Live Streaming Application?
To be honest, if you are investing a huge amount of money in developing a live streaming application it is obvious that you expect to earn a profit. So how can you make money through your live streaming application? Here are the 3 ways:
- Subscription Model
- Freemium Model
- Advertisements
In the subscription-based model, the user has to subscribe on your app to use it. For e.g. in Amazon Prime Video users have to take a subscription of Amazon Prime to access it. You can provide a monthly, quarterly or annual subscription plan.
In the freemium strategy, you will provide two models of your app free and premium. In the free model, you can get access to the limited content but to access a better version of yours they have to purchase the premium model.
Advertising is the most common way of earning money through applications. You can promote influencers by charging them a fee and can publish advertisements of different brands. Also, if the users don’t want advertisements on their app then either they have to subscribe or purchase the paid version of your app.
Technical Stack of your Live Streaming App
You can use these technologies while developing your Live Streaming App:
| Programming Language | Swift, Kotlin, and Java |
| CDN | CloudFare, Amazon |
| Hosting | AWS EC2 |
| API Server | Node.js |
| Media Processing Platform | DaCast, Wowza |
| Streaming Protocol | WebRTC, RTMP |
| Database | MySQL, MongoDB, Oracle |
Why Amplework?
At Amplework, the best mobile app development company, we are having expertise in developing a live streaming application, video streaming mobile apps, music streaming apps, etc. Whether it is an Android, iOS, or a React Native application development, we have experience in all. Let us know your requirements and we will leave no stone unturned to make an amazing app as per your idea.
