Global Live-streaming For Business: Getting Started on the Cloud

Live-streaming is the transmission of video or audio content simultaneously recorded and broadcast in real time to an audience.

It’s also one of the fastest growing services in the multimedia industry. In 2016, the global market was already worth more than USD $30BN and it’s projected to grow at an impressive CAGR of more than 18% and be worth $70BN by 2021.

Such significant growth is due to a worldwide realization of the benefits live-streaming could provide to both individuals and industries. From entertainment to e-commerce and education, live-streaming is breaking out of the social networks and into the corporate landscape to help a wide range of businesses actively engage with their audiences and customers.

However, there are many technical challenges when setting up a live-streaming service. Latency, bandwidth, security and scalability issues must all be addressed in order for live- streaming to provide the quality service that users demand. As such, you need a robust technical solution to stream, transcode, distribute, and play back your media content and compete in this burgeoning market.

In this whitepaper, we will introduce Alibaba Cloud’s live video and audio broadcasting platform ApsaraVideo Live. We will discuss the live-streaming market and its challenges, discuss the ApsaraVideo Live platform’s features and benefits, walk through various use cases for ApsaraVideo Live, and discuss the future of the live-streaming market.