Keep an audience engaged with interactive realtime features

Livestreams have gained immense popularity since 2020 as people come together for live sports and arts events, work, learn, and play. The interactive elements of livestreams, such as chat, emoji reactions, quizzes, leaderboards, and polls, allow viewers to engage with each other and the host. Twitch is a popular platform among gamers who stream their gameplay and webcam feed for others to watch and interact in real-time. The scale of live audiences has surpassed traditional TV networks, as seen during the 2019 League of Legends World Championship which had over 100 million viewers compared to the Super Bowl's 92 million TV viewers. Brands are leveraging livestream audience interaction to get closer to their customers and gather real-time feedback. The value of China's livestream e-commerce market grew at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 280 percent between 2017 and 2020, reaching an estimated $171 billion in 2020. Consumers appreciate the opportunity to interact with brands during livestreams, share their opinions, and feel included. Event-driven architecture is crucial for audience engagement as it supports instantaneous communication and real-time data exchange. The publish and subscribe (pub/sub) pattern is common in event-driven systems, allowing event producers to send messages when a state change occurs and event subscribers to consume them. This pattern supports audience engagement's main features, such as changes to presence information and delivery of chat messages. Audience sizes can vary significantly during events, making it essential for an audience engagement platform to be elastic and able to handle sudden large numbers of attendees. The non-blocking nature of a pub/sub pattern allows it to scale as needed with suitable infrastructure underpinning it. Presence information keeps track of each audience member, while chat messages are distributed in real-time using the pub/sub pattern. As companies innovate to meet users' expectations for online engagement, they embark on a real-time journey. Engineering a real-time event-driven architecture requires deep knowledge and expertise, making outsourcing the responsibility for real-time communication an attractive option. Ably offers an enterprise-ready edge messaging platform with cloud-based pub/sub messaging at its core, handling scale, latency, data durability, integrity, storage, seamless connection recovery, device interoperability, network outages, encryption, security, and authentication.