More than 35% of all Twitch streamers broadcast to 0 viewers,” Ryan Juel, Chief Operations Officer at Vimm says. “There’s no community.” As live-streaming has taken off, early streaming platforms have become monolithic, an amalgamation of isolated streams. Vimm seeks to remedy this by building a better community, one that plays, talks, and watches together.

“Our big thing,” Juel says, “has always been that we want people to be able to make the content that they want to make, and share it to their communities, be it as a podcast, by playing video games, making music, or a number of other things. We care about community building on Vimm.  We want our streamers to build and grow, and we make available the tools necessary to achieve this goal.”

One such tool is stream subscriptions. Subscriptions are arbitrarily blocked for users on Twitch, dangled as a carrot to lock users into a contract that is not favorable for them. “We, respectfully, disagree with this sentiment,” said Juel. “We make subscriptions available to anyone who streams on Vimm, because we want streamers to earn the support of their communities they deserve. It doesn’t make sense to restrict a growth opportunity to a select few when so many people stand to benefit from it. Our users love it, too. They’re telling their friends, and it’s helped Vimm grow!”

But in order to handle so many concurrent streams, the Vimm team knew they’d need a transcoding provider that was both powerful and cost-efficient. “We were struggling getting reasonably priced stable ingest servers. Streams would buffer between ingest regions. We really needed a CDN,” Juel says. “We looked at AWS cloud servers, adding a CDN through some other platforms, all were expensive. And then the team found Livepeer.com.”

“Offering transcoding, CDN, and network of ingest servers, all inhouse bundled under one package, was a strong selling point for Livepeer.com,” Juel says. “Then we played with the pricing calculator, and thought, "this is way lower than anything else we can get anywhere."

The team made the switch, and found Livepeer.com’s integration to be smoother than expected. “We’ve been loving it...The early issues were very minor, and easy to resolve. The availability of servers has been great. A lot of companies are inflexible with their availability and willingness to meet. Livepeer.com has always been available when we’ve needed to talk.”

Now, with a quickly growing user base and hosting dozens of concurrent streams daily, Juel says users are happier since the Livepeer.com integration. "People have noticed that we have transcoding. That was a feature they'd been asking about, but couldn't afford...it’s everything we’ve been looking for.”

To learn more about how Livepeer.com can help you and your business, get in touch at 

Livepeer.com Lets Vimm Make Streaming a Team Sport

After struggling for years to find ways to turn their work into repeatable income on video streaming platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch, creators are finally building the tools they need to own their audiences, and their wallets. Javier Gutierrez at 

 is one of them; as a classically trained musician missing his craft during COVID-19, he saw an opportunity to connect those seeking a good show with musicians from all over in the world.

“Classical musicians’ income basically comes from concerts, maybe some teaching, but they don't have many extra ways of monetizing their work,” Guttierrez says, “We wanted to give them a way to make money off the thing they love most, performing for an audience, without relying on agents and concert houses who decide who gets to play where, and how much they’re getting paid.”

Guttierez decided to build ClassicsPark.live as a livestream performance space, for musicians and those who love classical music to connect. Through the site, musicians would be able to stream concerts to audiences and charge for the performance, giving them a new source of income just as the pandemic had taken away their traditional ones. And to orchestrate this new offering, Guttierez and his team chose to build on Livepeer.

“I recall just Googling around so many video transcoding options. I tried a few, contacted many. And I just couldn't find the right option. They were either extremely expensive, or the quality was bad. And then I remember finding Livepeer.”

Guttierez connected with the customer success team at Livepeer, which helped him through the onboarding process. “I had already tried to make it work with YouTube, so I had some experience working in OBS. There was a slight difference between YouTube and Livepeer’s encoding specifications I messed up on, but after trading emails with the team, my CTO was able to have a basic setup working in under five minutes. It was impressive how simple it was.”


Without Livepeer, Guttierez says the team would have been priced out of building ClassicsPark.live, and would instead have had to stick with one-on-one music lessons as its main product. “Every other transcoding platform we tried had extremely high costs. It didn’t work for the type of business we were looking to build. What are we going to say, ‘Hey, come host a concert with us, we’ll give you less than half the revenue!’? And for many of the other options we looked at, the streaming quality wasn’t great, either.”

But it wasn’t just pricing that put Livepeer over the top. “The personal touch you gave to us was so valuable. I could sense the vibe of just being there if there was anything we needed. I had some really horrible experiences calling other transcoding providers, because I'm not a technical person myself. And I was quite impressed with the human factor at Livepeer.”

Now gearing up for ClassicsPark.live’s GA launch in June, Guttierez says Livepeer is still running smoothly. “It's a huge step toward peace of mind. To have a video streaming solution I can rely on, and know it will work. And, if sometimes something doesn't work, I know the Livepeer team is here as well.”

To learn more about how Livepeer can help you and your business, get in touch at 

Livepeer.com helps ClassicsPark give musicians a pandemic-ready stream of income

Pictured: Korkuma dashboard to create, promote and run livestream events

 founder Robert Tarabcak and his team had an epiphany: while video content has gradually become augmented with social interactions- likes, comments, recommendations, even tipping- video players themselves haven’t changed much since Quicktime’s debut in 1991.

This realization fueled the team’s decision to take the knowledge they gained building 

, a platform which allows creators to get paid in real time, and design 

: a new, richer live video infrastructure allowing any business or creator to sell through live commerce experiences on their website.

After interviewing small businesses considering using live commerce to sell their products, Tarabcak says it became clear industry standard solutions like AWS were either far too costly, too time-consuming, or too complex for them to integrate. 

“Video is the most expensive medium in the world,”

 Tarabcak says. “In order to build something for everyday creators and businesses to use, it was truly important for us not to overprice our services.”

 for video transcoding over the industry-standard AWS. Livepeer.com’s decentralized infrastructure was able to offer significant cost savings- enough to pass on to customers in the form of a less expensive product. Tarabcak notes, “My fear was having only the number-one player as an option. Because if you just compare how much AWS and the other players charge, what they charge for livestreams is ridiculous. We have some startup program discounts here and there, but it’s not enough. We even asked AWS if they could make the price much lower to compete with Livepeer.com, but they wouldn’t.”

Pictured: Influencer livestreaming an event for Zenni Optical

For Tarabcak and the team, if they wanted to target creators and small businesses, Livepeer.com was the obvious choice. “If we didn’t have Livepeer.com, we’d have to strongly consider repositioning ourselves in the market. We’d probably have to go after enterprise players instead.”

But switching to Livepeer.com didn’t come without concerns. Tarabcak remembers, “We were initially worried about latency. And now, I must say that our latency with Livepeer.com is smaller than the latency you see on Facebook...the fact that you can do it faster in a decentralized way, I love it.”

And Integration with a decentralized platform ended up being easier than expected. Tarabcak remembers Korkuma CTO Novak telling him, “They have just three functions, their documentation is pretty straightforward, they have an API, and oh, by the way, I was able to set it up within a week.” His reply was simple: “Oh yeah, that’s what I want to hear.”

Now, having integrated with Livepeer.com, Tarabcak says the team is looking forward to continuing to build out functionality for creators and small businesses. “Soon I’ll be able to go to a business’ website and watch experts show me products live, or see Elon Musk tweet he's going to be shopping online in five minutes, and follow along to see what he buys.”

Eventually Korkuma will allow any business to spin up live commerce experiences from wherever they interact with customers. “We position ourselves not as marketing to help you drive sales, but as a sales tool that you can integrate into your own website or mobile app, and whether you are a startup selling software like us, or trying to sell a physical product, you can create amazing events that will be an impulsive buying experience.”

Four months into running on Livepeer.com, Korkuma’s performance has been smooth so far. And as for those concerns over working with an up-and-coming service provider, they seem to have faded away. “We were initially worried about scaling alongside Livepeer.com. But now, we see all these partnerships, and the list of nodes growing each day, and we don’t have that frustration anymore. We consider Livepeer.com as a reliable partner for us for many, many years to come.”

Livepeer.com helps Korkuma bring immersive commerce to the masses

, a newly launched user-generated music platform, gives DJs the ability to stream and more personally interact with listeners. The platform was created as a full service solution for DJs to host licensed streaming and to use innovative features such as tipping, paid entry, and private streams to monetize their work. In turn, 

 gives music lovers on-demand, access-anywhere streams of their favorite DJs.

PlayDJ launched in April 2020 and experienced an immediate exponential growth in users. They acquired thousands of users in a matter of weeks, which brought with it complex scaling challenges.

 was reliant on existing cost-prohibitive streaming platforms to fulfill the increase in user demand. These streaming and transcoding companies’ unsustainable pricing structures and time-consuming integration processes became a serious barrier for growth. Faced with unsustainable costs, PlayDJ was forced to shut down their service for several weeks and rethink how to build an economically viable video centric creator platform.

To scale and match increasing demand, they needed a partner that would be able to help them implement the service quickly, provide infinite scalability and reliability, and offer a pricing model that would significantly reduce costs. The cost savings could then be re-invested into their business to support innovation and drive growth.

Their solution - use Livepeer.com as their transcoding provider. Livepeer, a forward-thinking video transcoding solution, takes advantage of decentralization to offer clients a service that is 10x more affordable than existing offerings. PlayDJ.tv was able to integrate Livepeer.com into their infrastructure within days to avoid expensive hardware investments and achieve what they were not able to do with traditional transcoding platforms - a 10x reduction in transcoding costs, seamless scalability given a growing user base, and easy API integration.

Had PlayDJ.tv continued to use more expensive traditional transcoding providers, it is likely that they would have not been able to offer their DJ’s a compelling service including free and low cost options.  This would have restricted their product offerings, minimized their user base, and stunted their growth as a company.

 is today able to provide high-quality and reliable streaming services to viewers and content creators at a price point that will allow them to scale without compromising on quality or user experience.

Blog

Welcome to the Livepeer.com blog.

Livepeer.com Lets Vimm Make Streaming a Team Sport

Livepeer.com Lets Vimm Make Streaming a Team Sport

Livepeer.com helps ClassicsPark give musicians a pandemic-ready stream of income

Livepeer.com helps Korkuma bring immersive commerce to the masses

PlayDJ, bringing DJ’s into people's homes during lockdown

Ready to get started?