What functions should live broadcast platforms have at the most basic level?
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Live video: This is the most basic function. The host terminal pushes out the video data, and the audience terminal receives and watches the video data. This can only be realized with the support of RTMP push stream function, and this step also determines the clarity and smoothness of the picture.
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Chat function: The audience can have text chat in the interactive area, and the host dialogue, want to say.
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Gift reward function: viewers can reward their favorite anchorwoman with gifts, such as yachts, sports cars and even castles.
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Payment/withdrawal function: Users can give gifts or guard for their favorite live broadcast. After receiving gifts or guards, anchors can exchange the platform virtual currency they have received into cash and withdraw it.
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Video playback function: record screen at the same time during live broadcast, whenever and wherever you want to watch the replay, fans will not miss the wonderful content of their favorite anchors live.
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Sharing function: Share the anchor channel or home page to wechat, Weibo or other platforms.
Technical implementation of the underlying operation support system
- Streaming media live content publishing system
For this part, in terms of the industry, it is the live streaming media server system. This system mainly realizes the forwarding function of live broadcast data stream. As shown below:
Do not underestimate this live streaming media server, it is the core part of the entire operation platform. Its performance and stability directly determine the stability and operating cost of the core business platform.
Some people said that there are all kinds of free live streaming media server software on the Internet, such as Live555, Red5, etc., and some people said that the cracked version of FMS software can be used to do it. Yes, these free or open source systems can be used as experimental platforms. But before you decide to use it on your own platform, you should test it out for yourself, or you’re being really irresponsible. As soon as you test it, you will find that these are basically lab-grade products, which fall far short of the stability and performance requirements of an operation-grade platform. Therefore, this is a good explanation for the major live streaming platforms have invested a lot of money to develop their own streaming media server systems. If these free or cracked versions of the system can use these live broadcast operating platforms (Inke, Yizhu, Huajiao Live, Tencent Cloud, Ali Cloud, Letv Cloud, Youku, iQiyi, etc.) to invest more human and material resources to develop their own live streaming media platforms, it will be meaningless.
The real operational streaming media server system can support 5000 concurrent online users in a single machine. Such core system is usually implemented by C or C++ programming language, which has high resource utilization efficiency.
If such functional modules need to be purchased from a third party, the cost is about 50,000 to 100,000 yuan/server authorization.
- Streaming media content distribution system
In terms of the industry, this is the streaming media CDN system, which can automatically distribute the live broadcast content among multiple node servers, so as to realize one-point release and full-network broadcast. End users can automatically choose the server node nearest to them to receive the content.
Professional video websites such as Youku and IQiyi are able to provide services for hundreds of millions of Chinese netizens because they have a powerful and efficient CDN content distribution network system.
Such underlying CDN system is usually developed and realized by the operators themselves. If they want to purchase functional modules of commercial operation level, the authorization fee is about 30,000 to 60,000 yuan per node. Moreover, to build a content distribution network platform covering the whole country usually requires the construction of hundreds of content distribution nodes, so the investment is very considerable.
- Live recording and vod replay system
This part of the function is relatively simple to implement, but to achieve higher performance indicators, still requires a lot of effort to do in-depth development. Usually do, live recording everyone will think of ffmpeg, do on demand back to see you also thought of using the Apache or Nginx, but for carrier-grade service platform, if there is no guarantee of stability, without the performance guarantee, then you will find that operating costs will be more and more high, operating efficiency is more and more low, eventually because the user experience is poor, Add to that the funding crunch that forces you to rebuild from the ground up, or buy a commercial version of the system.