When enterprises launch live streaming services, how can they avoid technology becoming a stumbling block?

[Original article from 51CTO.com] After experiencing a roller coaster-like ups and downs in 2016, China's online live broadcasting industry gradually rose in 2017. With the rapid popularization of live shows, game broadcasts, and entertainment broadcasts, the online live broadcasting industry has become the most active label on the Internet in 2017. Under the guidance of national policies, it has always maintained a healthy development trend.

The "China New Media Development Report (2017)" released by *** shows that the market size of online live streaming has increased from approximately 9 billion yuan in 2015 to 15 billion yuan in 2016, an increase of 67%. It is expected to expand into a large industry with a scale of hundreds of billions by 2020.

Although the market is constantly expanding, it is not easy for live broadcast platforms to be in the wave. With increasingly fierce competition and the homogenization of live broadcast products, if you want to stand out among the nearly 300 live broadcast platforms in China and have a certain number of active users, in addition to pursuing differentiation and doing a good job in marketing, you must also have strong technical support.

Recently, the reporter interviewed Chen Xi, CTO of Lang Live, a popular online live broadcast application platform developed and operated by a mainland team, focusing on the Taiwan market and gradually radiating to Southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. He shared with the reporter how Lang Live went from internal project establishment and product launch to rapid development to become one of the leading live broadcast platforms in Taiwan in just one year, as well as the technical stories behind the cool live broadcast interface.

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LangLive CTO Chen Xi

Differentiation analysis to find the right position

Chen Xi told reporters that compared with other live broadcast platforms, Lang Live’s feature is that it has greater openness and richer gameplay, so it has very high requirements for the quality of audio and video, especially in terms of opening within seconds, stream stability, clarity and delay.

"We found that the anchors paid special attention to the playback after the live broadcast. The main reason is probably that they hope to observe the details of their live broadcast in the playback, accumulate and summarize various experiences, and hope to better optimize the subsequent live broadcast." Chen Xi said that after an in-depth analysis of the anchors' behavior on the platform, Lang Live's technical team and partners carried out comprehensive research in various aspects such as players, streamers, CDN, storage, encoding and decoding, and transcoding services, and finally formed the basic technical structure of Lang Live today.

Although the beginning is difficult, it is better to have help

Chen Xi admitted that when LangLive was first established, the technical pressure was actually very high. In addition to meeting the development needs at the product level, they were also responsible for the launch and operation of the platform, and even had to pay attention to the market landing. All of this was new and unfamiliar to a start-up technical team. "Although I have been working in the IT field for many years, the Taiwan market is still an unknown area for most of us, mainly because we are not familiar with the local technical environment, IDC computer room, CDN and other infrastructure." He revealed that the technical team tried to use overseas to cover Taiwan's local services, but the test results were not ideal, which seriously affected the scheduled launch time of the platform.

"During this period, we especially hope that a reliable technology vendor can stand by our side, provide assistance and share their experience. Such companionship is much more precious than other things." The vendor Chen Xi mentioned is Yunfan Accelerator. Although Yunfan Accelerator is a new type of technology-driven Internet technology company, it has a very deep understanding of the live broadcast industry and can provide a lot of help to start-ups. At that time, Yunfan Accelerator fully supported and went directly to the headquarters of Lang Live to deploy servers and computer rooms, debug the entire technical framework, and assist the technical team in establishing the prototype of Lang Live live broadcast.

Chen Xi mentioned that professional manufacturers often have excellent industry experience in professional fields, which is a very valuable resource for enterprises and one of their core competitiveness. Therefore, every enterprise expects technology manufacturers to communicate more with enterprises to understand their ideas and goals, and be able to provide professional advice and complete solutions.

Growing Pains

The good start allowed LangLive to quickly open up the market and win applause. As the platform continues to grow, the pressure on technology is also increasing. In this regard, Chenxi summarizes the changes in technology into four categories:

First, the basic IT system needs to meet the needs of large traffic, with higher bandwidth, storage capacity, computing nodes and server load to cope with the growing user scale of the Lang Live platform;

Secondly, in order to ensure the stability and continuity of services, more redundant designs and failover methods are needed at the technical architecture level;

Furthermore, the backend tools need to be upgraded to directly help the operation team quickly handle online problems and monitor various online situations such as service quality, content, node health, etc.;

***, the demand for data analysis has become more urgent. The technical team hopes to explore the value of data and clues by reading and analyzing a large number of data reports to help the technical team move towards higher goals.

In Chen Xi's view, Lang Live is a latecomer in the field of live video broadcasting. Faced with many pioneers, the technical team was very nervous at the beginning, especially in the technical aspects of audio and video. Fortunately, it has the support of strong friendly companies, especially Yunfan Accelerator, which fully assisted Lang Live in building a complete set of live broadcast basic technology system based on Taiwan, China from scratch at the beginning, supporting the timely launch of Lang Live product release goals, and became a major acceleration for Lang Live to enter the Taiwan market. Later, as Lang Live became more and more familiar with the local environment in Taiwan, China, it put forward many localized coverage requirements to Yunfan Accelerator, and also received full support and affirmation from Yunfan Accelerator. The two sides formed a good interaction in the process of Lang Live, which enabled the technical work to be carried out more smoothly and gradually resolved the technical pressure in the company's scale growth.

Choosing a manufacturer is also choosing a strategic partner

As we all know, enterprises are particularly cautious when making purchases, and Lang Live is no exception. Chen Xi said that he had contacted many CDN manufacturers at the time, but some manufacturers backed off when they heard that they were going to deploy the market in Taiwan, China, and they had no final idea about how to deploy the technology. Later, when communicating with Yunfan Accelerator, Chen Xi found that Yunfan Accelerator not only showed sufficient professionalism, but also had full confidence in its solutions, and its quotations were not as inflated as those in the industry. Finally, after many in-depth exchanges, Lang Live resolutely chose Yunfan Accelerator as its strategic partner, and Yunfan Accelerator was fully responsible for their technical deployment and local coverage in Taiwan, China. After less than two weeks of hard work, Lang Live finally opened smoothly at the planned time.

After the work was carried out smoothly, it was still inevitable to spend a lot of time and energy on on-site tuning. Chen Xi believes that problems are inevitable, but the key is that manufacturers can quickly locate and solve them in the shortest time. During the operation, Lang Live also encountered common operation and maintenance problems such as network failures and problems in the computer room, but because Yunfan Accelerator has strong experience in disaster recovery and backup, it was basically resolved in a short time, thus solving the online crisis. Later, Lang Live tried to improve the viewing experience of the audience in mainland China, so that when they watch Lang Live, the time to enter the room can be controlled to about 1 second. These needs were well met by Yunfan Accelerator.

Technology will play a vital role in the future of live sports

Chen Xi is very confident about the future development of the live broadcast market. He believes that the future live broadcast market is not only a competition in terms of content and operation, but also a battle in terms of technology. Whether it is the introduction of new technologies or the deepening of basic technology research, these are directions in which the technology can continue to develop.

He explained in detail that, firstly, technical features such as beauty, face tracking and facial effects, and multi-person interaction are becoming standard requirements for live streaming; secondly, when dealing with poor network quality, weak network optimization is also where live streaming platforms can improve service quality; thirdly, AR technology has become increasingly important in live streaming, and various AR-based gameplay can greatly enhance the fun of the live broadcast room and improve the playability of the product. Many live streaming platforms are accelerating the application of AR; in addition, online monitoring technology can greatly improve the ability to operate products, and therefore it is becoming increasingly important.

[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]