How to build a video streaming app like netflix?

Introduction

The way people communicate all over the world has changed now!!!

Live streaming is the live broadcasting of video content over internet. This has caused a major change in the way we communicate. Live streaming is becoming inevitable in the digital world where all sorts of organizations like education, business, entertainment, even family & friends meeting are flourishing because of this

Overview of Market Share

There is a great demand for live streaming. This has caused the live streaming market to grow. Covid – 19 is also one of the important growth factor. According to Global market insights the video chat market will grow by over 15% CAGR

How live streaming works?

A streaming server has to be already created and running. A broadcaster can initiate a stream by registering with a stream name. The users who want to be an audience can access the stream with the same stream name. When a stream is initiated, the below process happens to make the video available at the receiving end

Live streaming undergoes the below steps

• Compression
• Encoding
• Segmentation
• Content Delivery Network (CDN) distribution
• CDN caching
• Decoding
• Video playback

Features to have

User Sign up & Sign in

It can be a simple registration with an email or phone number and password. It’s a good way to offer sign-ups or ins via Facebook, Twitter, or Google as it saves the users’ time. A password reset feature via email or text message is needed

User Profile

It is better to decide on what kind of personal information will be in the user profiles like profile picture, full name, subscriptions, etc., This can be viewed by friends & subscribers

Live Streaming

Allows the user to record and broadcast a live stream to members who have subscribed to his/her channel or the public

Chat

Chat is an essential part of any communication application. Chat combined with live streaming will be very useful for the audience to give their feedback. Third-party tools like Firebase or Twilio helps to integrate chat into video chatting. Can include Emojis to make the chat interesting

Record

Feature to record the videos and can have a user gallery to store and organize the recorded videos on user profile

How to develop a live streaming app using WebRTC?

Backend development

Create a live streaming application by means of WebRTC technology

For a live stream to happen, the live video has to be sent to a server so that it can distribute the live stream to the audience or subscribers. So, a media server should be running somewhere that you can access

There are many open source WebRTC media servers available. One such is Ant Media Server that can live stream & supports ultra-low latency (0.5 seconds) adaptive streaming and records live videos in several formats like HLS, MP

Set up a media server You can download ant media server & use its trial version license

Broadcast live stream Provide a stream name for the video stream and start recording. This will be passed to the ant media server

View live stream The subscriber can use the same steam name to join the stream and view the live video

UI/UX design

Next comes the good & attractive user interface & user experience. It is better to have simple navigation as it will be convenient to understand. The user has to grasp the need for features & their performance

Tech stack

Video Section