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Ask HN: What sort of software stack to live-streaming apps like Meerkat use?

1 points by akhilcacharya ↗ HN
This could apply to things like Meerkat or the other Life On Air apps. I'm curious as to if they use traditional streaming technologies or if they use something more new, like WebRTC (I'm not sure if WebRTC is scalable for something like this, but whatever)

2 comments

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andymoe
Well I don't know what they use but there are a bunch of streaming media servers that can do this. Wowza Streaming Engine [1] is top notch and pretty standard [2]

Wowza even has a kind of a demo app [2] that can do the streaming part of what meerkat does and it's been around for at least a couple years. The streaming part of meerkat is not real interesting or novel but the social part clearly is.

If it's me and I want to get to market really really quickly I would just pay someone who specializes in this to run the streaming infrastructure because it's the least interesting part but actually pretty hard to run at scale yourself.

As an aside, I think they are in trouble because Facebook or Twitter (just acquired a competitor in beta) will get into this space quickly... The tech is not novel at all and the existing social networks have the graph already and can replicate this very easily now that it's showing promise.

[1] http://www.wowza.com/products/streaming-engine

[2] http://www.wowza.com/customers

[3] http://www.wowza.com/products/gocoder