Live Streaming & Short Video

One-stop live & video delivery

Live streaming, mobile SDKs, VOD, and short-video SDKs in one stack — with CDN acceleration and transcoding built in for high-concurrency live events.

What's included

Global low-latency live delivery
Adaptive multi-bitrate transcoding
Recording & VOD replay
Content moderation

The stages a live stream passes through

Ingest, transcode, distribute, play — with recording and moderation alongside. Each stage has its own resource cost and its own optimization. The value of knowing the chain is diagnostic: when you see stutter or an overrun bill, you can tell which stage is responsible instead of just adding bandwidth.

An unstable ingest shows up as artifacts and dropped streams; bad transcoding settings produce a mismatch between quality and bitrate; distribution problems show as stutter in specific regions. Same symptom class, three completely different investigations.

Bandwidth and transcoding dominate the bill

Delivery bandwidth is usually the overwhelming majority of a live bill, with transcoding second. Bandwidth scales with viewer count, bitrate, and duration — and bitrate is the easiest of the three to tune. Trimming it modestly while quality stays acceptable, or adapting per viewer network conditions, cuts delivery cost directly.

On transcoding, avoid enabling every ladder rung. Viewers concentrate on two or three resolutions; turning off the unused ones cuts transcoding cost noticeably with almost no effect on experience.

The latency-versus-cost trade-off

Standard live protocols run at tens of seconds of latency, and that buys low cost and broad compatibility. Pushing to sub-second latency needs shorter segments and a more complex delivery path, which costs more and is more sensitive to network jitter.

Decide by scenario: live commerce, co-hosting, and quiz formats justify paying for low latency. Rebroadcast and one-way keynote streaming are more economical on the standard-latency path.

Frequently asked questions

How low can live latency go?

Standard protocols sit around tens of seconds; low-latency setups reach a few seconds; the most aggressive approaches get under a second but at significantly higher cost and engineering complexity. Match it to the use case — a few seconds is ample for viewer interaction, and purely passive viewing does not justify paying for the extreme.

Should I enable every transcoding rung?

No. Each rung consumes transcoding capacity, and in practice only two or three get watched. Launch with the minimal set covering mainstream network conditions, watch the actual per-rung share in your analytics, then disable the ones nobody uses.

What is the cheaper way to serve replays?

Record, then move the asset to object storage and deliver it as VOD through a CDN. VOD cache hit ratios are far higher than live, so the same viewing volume costs much less to deliver — which is why replays rarely ride the live path.

Let us talk about your case

Architecture differs a lot by workload — an engineer can help you assess.

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