Create a stream

Live streaming with Livepeer.com is easy. The first step is understanding the stream object. It is the core building block of the Livepeer.com platform.

A Livepeer.com stream is a unique object with configuration data and metadata about all live stream sessions associated with it.

There are two ways to create a stream object:

Login to the Livepeer.com Dashboard, and navigate to the Streams page, livepeer.com/dashboard/streams. On this page you can create a new stream and delete streams. When you name your stream, pick a unique name and include URL compatible characters only.

On the Stream page (livepeer.com/dashboard/streams), you can also click on a stream to find out configuration and usage information.

Send a POST request to https://livepeer.com/api/stream. This creates a new Livepeer.com stream object.

Use a Livepeer.com API key as a part of the authorization header, and use a JSON body to specify the configuration for the stream. The only parameter you are required to set is the name of your stream, but we also highly recommend that you define the profiles parameter with 720p, 480p and 360p renditions.

If you do not define transcoding rendition profiles when creating the stream, no transcoding will happen. Your playback video will have the attributes of the source stream only, will not take advantage of adaptive bitrate streaming and will likely buffer.

Here is an example request:

curl -X POST \
-H 'content-type: application/json' \
-H 'authorization: Bearer {api_key}' \
-d '{
  "name": "test_stream",
  "profiles": [
    {
      "name": "720p",
      "bitrate": 2000000,
      "fps": 30,
      "width": 1280,
      "height": 720
    },
    {
      "name": "480p",
      "bitrate": 1000000,
      "fps": 30,
      "width": 854,
      "height": 480
    },
    {
      "name": "360p",
      "bitrate": 500000,
      "fps": 30,
      "width": 640,
      "height": 360
    }
  ]
}' \
https://livepeer.com/api/stream

This is an example response to the request above. streamKey, playbackId, and id are unique to the stream object. You will need the streamKey to broadcast live video and the playbackId to configure the playback URL to watch the live stream.

{
    "name":"test_stream",
    "profiles":[
        {"name":"720p","bitrate":2000000,"fps":30,"width":1280,"height":720},
        {"name":"480p","bitrate":1000000,"fps":30,"width":854,"height":480},
        {"name":"360p","bitrate":500000,"fps":30,"width":640,"height":360},
      ],
    "id":"ijkl61f3-95bd-4971-a7b1-4dcb5d39e78a",
    "createdAt":1596081229373,
    "streamKey":"abcd-uimq-jtgy-x98v",
    "playbackId":"efghb2mxupongp5k",
    {other asset object keys}
}