Leveraging Amazon IVS in Creating Unique Ecommerce Livestreaming Experience

From powering live trivia sessions for Samsung, to helping fashion retailers sell out limited edition inventory in minutes, BeLive Technology has delivered more than 50 million hours of live video since 2018. Offering rich interactivity and analytics, the company’s customizable live streaming service is a go-to for notable brands and celebrities in southeast Asia looking to boost real-time viewer engagement and monetization.Available as an end-to-end white label solution for custom streaming platforms, a one-click install SDK for customers with an in-house development team, and a live shopping solution, BeLive Technology is built on a host of Amazon Web Services (AWS), including  (Amazon IVS) to ensure high-quality, low-latency, and resilient live streams.“We’ve built our technology on AWS to ensure reliability, so adding Amazon IVS to our toolset made sense. Already familiar with the SDK, it was easy to integrate, supports a wide range of different platforms and browsers, and provides the lowest latency we’ve found, which is crucial for livestreamed ecommerce,” said Kenneth Tan, BeLive Technology CEO. “Most of our customers depend on us to operate the livestream services that we create for them. With Amazon IVS under the hood, we can easily manage hundreds of thousands of live streams running concurrently. Also, its affordable pricing helps us provide the best quality and value, and getting that mix otherwise would be incredibly difficult.”BeLive switched to IVS from alternate live streaming engine/content delivery network solutions to solve several workflow challenges.Hassan Abid, CTO of BeLive explained, “When we switched to IVS we were able to reduce latency from 8-to-4 seconds for global HLS delivery; could scale to target more customers worldwide without having to worry about provisioning infrastructure, enabling our DevOps resources to focus on feature-rich app development; and could give our customers secure, protected options to deliver high quality pay-per-view streams.”Founded originally as a social platform to connect influencers with fans via live video, BeLive pivoted its focus to livestreaming when the company recognized a gap for such a service in southeast Asia.While a majority of its livestreams originate in the APAC region, such as those by more than 100,000 users on Japan’s primary ecommerce platform, Rakuten, BeLive streams reach a global audience, delivered quickly and securely in high quality via the expansive infrastructure footprint of AWS. Using livestream video to engage customers is very popular in the region, particularly when targeting millennial shoppers seeking out exclusive timed drops from premium fashion brands.“Prior to the pandemic, almost 100 percent of our customers came from e-commerce, with merchants using our service to promote their products and engage potential buyers. In the past year, our customer base has expanded into other areas like telehealth, social media platforms, education, and real estate. Companies now recognize the importance of quality livestreaming, and with Amazon IVS, we have the tools and flexibility to connect them with their intended audiences, wherever they may be and in more dynamic ways,” said Tan.BeLive started beta testing IVS in its earliest iterations, working hand in hand with AWS engineers to provide feedback, “We had a specific customer that wanted to facilitate multiple livestreams in multiple regions, and low latency was essential for their audience. We knew that IVS would deliver the reliability, speed, global footprint, and ability to scale up quickly. Our familiarity with the AWS SDK combined with strong support enabled us to get up and running very quickly to release IVS as an integrated offering to our customers in the beginning of this year,” said Abid.Along with leveraging Amazon IVS for livestreams, playback and recording of videos, BeLive harnesses AWS Media Services to enable video-on-demand (VOD) content delivery using Amazon CloudFront, along with the AWS Elemental MediaConvert file-based transcoding service to ensure content is viewable across a range of device types; and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storage.Increasingly, BeLive is also integrating analytics-gathering solutions from IVS into its builds, providing customers with insights into how their streams perform and how users interact with them.“We’re offering more analytics tools so that customers can see how many viewers are joining, leaving, shopping, and at which points within a given stream they’re generating peak engagement. This data analysis facilitated through the IVS dashboard is invaluable to our customers and provides them with hard data for how to improve their future shows and draw and grow audiences,” added Ken Ang, COO of BeLive.