A New Approach to Live Streaming

The world of live streaming is undergoing significant changes in user behavior that are driving the need to reevaluate the live streaming tech stack. Traditional methods have involved combining RTMP encoded media streams at the streamer's end and HLS streams at the viewer's end, with an industry of media servers in the middle for transcription. However, new user behaviors such as democratization, interactivity, and creator collaboration are driving a shift towards WebRTC becoming an alternative to RTMP in the live streaming tech stack. This modern protocol built over UDP can adjust encoding bitrates based on network feedback, is more widely available, supports interactivity, and enables creator collaboration out of the box. The evolution in live video will leverage conferencing tech to introduce interactivity and other benefits while conferencing will leverage streaming tech to scale video calls to many viewers in near real-time.