How to Create a Video Streaming App: Features, Cost, and Tech Stack
Live content streaming has busted into people’s lives with no turning back, opening up a whole new kind of media.
Developing video streaming apps for years, we’ve collected quite a massive of valuable insights, industry challenges, app feature trends, and development key points that will help you pave the way to building a demanded high-quality streaming platform.
The popularity and demand for live streaming apps are growing exponentially. Its market share is projected to reach $534.37 billion by 2030, making the industry one of the most intensively developing. Apart from the impressive industry value, the amount of time globally spent on streaming apps last year surpassed 548 billion hours. The industries that rely on video streams to provide their services include retail, entertainment, education, gaming, fitness, and even government. Such a wide consumer base ensures a stable and swift growth of the live streaming market.
Before embarking on a durable process of live video streaming app development, take your time to explore the range of applications you can build and distinguish between the user needs they serve.
Live Streaming Apps
The whole live streaming buzz started right from this type of application that enabled users to record and air their self-made video content to other people, get feedback and interact with them. The most popular examples of video streaming platforms with user-generated content are Periscope, Snapchat, Twitch, etc. Apart from numerous mobile apps tailored specifically for live video streaming, the majority of social media apps now have a built-in real-time broadcasting feature like Instagram Live and Facebook Live.
Video on Demand Apps
The era of unmatched streaming quality gave birth to VOD applications that allow users to have a brand new lean-back experience watching the series, shows, and movies in top-notch quality whenever they want without wasting time on annoying ads. Today there is a great variety of such platforms like Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, etc.
TV Live Streaming Apps
VOD platforms are great but they might lack plenty of channels, sports, and talk shows people love. To bridge the gap between watching your favorite shows and watching them conveniently, developers have introduced TV live streaming apps that allow users to enjoy their TV online, fast-forwarding through the video content.
How to Develop a Video Streaming App: Must-Have Features
To build a compelling live video streaming software you’ll have to analyze your most popular competitors, explore their weak spots, add new app features and meticulously think through every minute detail concerning the future app. To start off, here’s a list of basic essential features you have to build in your video streaming platform.
Users and Accounts
Create individual user space where one can change personal info, change subscription terms, see favorites, and manage settings. Besides, enable multiple account holders access to the app from the same device.
Meta Data Management
Make it convenient for subscribers to see the written preview of each video content piece presented on the screen. Meta data management streamlines app navigation and enhances user experience by saving time on video searching.
Library and Categorization
Build a clear and navigable video content library by creating multiple categories according to content genres, rates, actors, topics, etc. Don’t make users get lost in an unstructured mass of movies, videos, and shows.
Intelligent Search
Incorporate the ML-powered intelligent search feature into your live streaming app to help your subscribers reach the wanted content quickly and enjoy targeted recommendations based on user behavior and preferences.
Voice Search
Ensure an exceptional lean-back experience by enabling users to navigate their video streaming platform by voice, avoiding complex remote controls. The voice search feature is supported by all the major smart TV producers.
DRM
Live video streaming is susceptible to theft and free release on pirate websites. DRM is an essential tool for securing your rights to the content streamed in your app and prevents it from being illegally recorded and shared.
Subscriptions and Retention
The majority of video content airing platforms are available after purchasing paid subscriptions. To ensure customer retention, make sure to offer a range of subscription plans to cater to the needs of all the app user categories.
Ad Campaigns
Incorporating ads into your content is one of the most used ways of video streaming app monetization. You can improve campaign placement and make it useful for all the parties concerned by relying on the audience’s personal data and viewing behaviors to provide more targeted and less annoying ads.
Local Ad Server
Ad-based video content monetization starts from selecting or developing a custom ad server that will store video ads, insert them into the stream to deliver to target audiences, and analyze the clickability and overall performance of placed ads.
SSAI
Server-Side Ad Insertion technology allows content owners to integrate ads into the stream avoiding buffering, ad-blockers, and watching experience interruptions. SSAI is the best way to monetize your app without losing streaming quality.
Ad Detection
To simplify the ad insertion process, leverage the ad detection ML-powered feature. The technology is used to identify ad breaks within the streaming content and place and renew targeted advertisements with no interruptions.
Storage
At the pre-development stage, decide on the type of video content storage. Cloud-based storing solutions to date are the most cost-efficient and reliable ones, providing seamless data management and on-demand space scalability.
How to Tame Live Streaming App Development
We know how to leverage these features to build powerful, top-notch quality scalable video streaming apps that bring value to businesses and provide the desired content to end-users. Using decade-long expertise, our team has built a next-gen OTT solution for a major motorsport content provider.
The software building request included live and on-demand motorsports streaming, incorporation of several monetization models, assurance of low broadcasting latency, rock-solid system security, and its stability regardless of the number of simultaneous connections.
Our team managed to build a multiscreen SVOD platform enriched with state-of-the-art features like Multi-CDN, DVR module, video recommendation engine, Live-to-VoD, and many others to provide an unmatched motorsport content watching experience. As a result, we helped the client:
- Reach wider audiences due to cross-platform video delivery;
- Boost content monetization;
- Ensure user retention;
- Enter the new level of business development.
An experienced video streaming app development vendor can help you reach new business heights.
Step-by-Step Video Streaming App Development
A clear-cut development strategy is the best thing you can do to ensure an understandable and hustle-free app-building process. Here are the basic steps to follow:
Step 1: Define a Niche
You want to build an app that will be targeted at a specific audience to cover their needs better than your competitors (if any). Finding your niche in the live streaming market is essential to ensure stable customer flow and retention. An in-depth market analysis is what you need at this stage.
Step 2: Pick a Monetization Model
Live streaming apps provide 3 ways of video content monetization, namely through ads, paid user subscriptions, and enabling people to rent or buy a high-quality piece of content.
- The ad-based monetization model implies streaming content without charging users but gaining profit through paid ad placement.
- The subscription-based one basically refers to offering paid monthly, quarterly, or yearly subscriptions for your OTT service.
- And last but not least, you can get revenue by selling videos so that users can watch them an unlimited number of times, or by selling one-time-watch access to them.
App owners rarely rely on a single monetization strategy combining 2 or 3 of them instead. The choice of the model is about user needs and content type so take your time to create a good-looking proposition.
Step 3: Choose a Reliable Vendor
The choice of video streaming app development service is truly a challenge. Apart from the vast experience and industry expertise, a vendor should employ an agile approach to cooperation and provide custom tailor-made solutions for each project. So make sure to go through case studies and test the target industry's competence before signing a contract.
Step 4: Decide on the Tech Stack
Tech stack includes a great variety of elements you should decide on, but as applied to video streaming software development, there are 3 key points to focus on.
- First, it is the streaming protocol the choice of which depends on the type of streaming you’ll need. RTMP protocol ensures high-quality video broadcasting but has 10–20 secs streaming latency. WebRTC protocol has minimal latency but loses quality compared to RTMP.
- Secondly, you’ll have to choose the content streaming platform to build your app on. Each ecosystem has its own peculiarities, so make sure to get acquainted with them in advance. For example, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform are great options to choose from.
- Finally, pay attention to selecting a CDN because it is the content delivery network that ensures adequate stream performance. The list of the best CDN providers includes Cloudflare, Fastly, KeyCDN, and StackPath.
Step 5: Design UX/UI
Style, navigability, and convenience are the three pillars of a successful video app design that make users stay in it all day long. Avoid screen mess, add smart navigation features, and give the platform some clean space and flow. Building well-thought-through UI/UX is a prerequisite for establishing a recognizable video streaming brand.
Step 6: Build an MVP
The development of any application requires beta testing its MVP before building the final app version. In the case of video streaming app development, this step is even more crucial to ensure great performance, low streaming latency, and flowy feature functioning.
Step 7: Develop, Test, Improve, and Release
Live streaming app-building doesn’t really stop after the development, testing, improving, and launching. These four steps should be continuously repeated to maintain the product’s agility, security, and relevance. Constant improvement is the best remedy against user churn.
How Much Does It Cost to Create a Video Streaming App?
The question of project duration and cost is essential for anyone planning to dive into video streaming app development. Although there is no accurate answer, we tried to present some figures that make up the final project cost.
Processes — Development Duration — Cost Limits
Front-End Development — Around 6 Months — From $575K to $1.7M
Back-End + Front-End Development — Around 10 Months — From $1.7M to $6.2M
The price for developing a high-quality video streaming app is far from being fixed. It fully depends on the set of features you want to incorporate and on the type of OS your app will run on. For example, front and back-end development for Webos And Tizen will cost you from $140K to $420K.
As for the app features, the price for the integration of distribution, customers, and business rules starts from $325K; content management will take around $225K to $725K; asset management, media analysis, metadata enrichment, and editing features will cost you from $375K; ingest and storage incorporation takes from $150K.
As you see, the richer the feature-set of your future app is, the higher the price. So before freaking out about the streaming app development prices, decide on the functional stack your app requires, calculate the approximate cost of your final product, and sigh with relief.
Tech Challenges to Watch Out For
It’s always better to know your enemy before you actually face it, so here are a few pitfalls to get ready for.
Video Streaming App Scaling
Increased user base means not only a higher bottom line but also bigger pressure on the platform that might cause functional problems and decrease streaming quality. Prepare the ground for painless app scaling at the stage of development, and make sure to incorporate features that will maintain the performance of your service at any number of concurrent stream views.
Content Security
The protection of user data they leave to subscribe to your service is one of the main security concerns for any streaming platform owner. To avoid data breaches and content theft, pay extra attention to choosing rock-solid encryption algorithms.
Streaming Quality
Fluctuating stream quality is one of the reasons for swift user churn and the loss of an app’s hard-won reputation. Premium quality video content delivery should be backed by reliable distribution tools and mechanisms that prevent such factors as network stability, poor CDN performance, and cloud server issues from spoiling the user experience.
Streaming App Architecture
The proven way to ensure smooth video streaming app functioning is to go for microservice product architecture. Several APIs support the individual operating of services that collectively provide stable and seamless streaming platform performance, painless scaling, and improvement.
Wrapping Up
Custom video streaming app development is gaining momentum and opens up immense business opportunities for video content creators. Expanding your knowledge about the platform-building process increases the chances of launching a successful live streaming app that will survive in the harsh competitive market. Industry experts can help you lay the foundation for your future video streaming app development.
