How to Build a Video Streaming Website, Service, or Platform like Netflix, Amazon, or Hulu

‘Loonatics!’ ‘Isn’t that a bit over-the-top?!’ over-the-top (OTT) video content!

• What is over-the-top video content
• How to make a video streaming website
• Video streaming website: user-facing features
• How to choose a technology stack for a video streaming site
• Understand a streaming website architecture
• Study the video streaming server requirements
• Dig into video streaming protocols
• BONUS! Video streaming website: a startup kit

Away with downloads! Video streaming service rules!

Oh, I get it! Another YouTube rabbit hole!

pre-recorded live On-demand video didn’t ask Live streaming FOMO

So video streaming, huh? Tell me about it!

Video streaming codec container format streaming protocol

Over-the-top video streaming is gaining ground

• Storage space: no more downloads to a laptop, desktop, or phone.
• Access: anytime anyplace with consistent internet connection.
• Good ol’ buttons: pause, rewind, fast forward same way as on a VCR.
• In control: away with spoon-feeding! Binge-watch your favourite shows.
• Variety: high-quality professional on-demand videos, user-generated content (UGC), or live streaming events to cater to all tastes.
• Virality: video content is the most shareable and engaging (hear, hear marketing folk!).

Sounds like business, right?

$70.5 billion industry by 2021 80% of consumers Live streaming is catching on in business

• Home page. The place to inform your users of the benefits they will find, show them the capabilities, mesmerize them by the looks and promises of entertainment. The Home section highlights movies, TV shows, sports programs, and other categories of content, and is customized according to each user’s preferences (thanks to a complex recommendation algorithm).
• Onboarding. Needless to say how much onboarding benefits a product use. How else would they know you offer the best functionality? But there’s more! Reduce your users’ learning curve and ensure they know every nook and cranny of your site. This will make their stay unforgettable.
• Registration/Login. An indispensable interactive element for a VOD service. Provide a variety of ways for your user to register/log-in:
  • Facebook login
  • Google login
  • Mobile number for OTP verificationAlso, how can you start a video streaming website without a password recovery option?
• User profile. It’s good to have somewhere to feel at home in. After a home page, a user profile is virtually this dashboard to navigate through the entire journey, not to mention an excellent place for you to get insights (analytics-wise).
• Settings. Letting users control the level of their privacy is a good tactic. Allow users to toggle between privacy options for the audience and social platforms to broadcast to.

Video consumers would appreciate it if you build a streaming platform with these features:

• Search a video. Once your platform has grown, it could be increasingly hard to find the content. You need a strict system of categories and an extended system of indicators for users to filter through. Keep filters for searching by location, broadcast topic, date, length of the video, genres, language, and most-watched, etc. Auto-correct and autocomplete will quicken the procedure, especially for a mobile user. Choose one of these tools to implement search on your website.

• Video library. Create ‘shelves’ for viewers to treasure their best video experiences – ‘viewed’ history, to watch later, favorites, likes, shares and such. The ‘expiring’ category (Hulu) indicates the episodes that might be prioritized on your watch-list.

• Video player & play experiences. Video players are your first point of contact with your audience, so delivering the best possible experience is key. Viewers can create a familiar look and feel by customizing the following elements: player logo, watermark, a quality selector (crucial for a mobile viewer on a limited data plan), info screen, share & embed options, related videos, playlist configuration, download button. Mind the integrations: analytics, monetization.

• Subscription & interaction. Users should be able to subscribe to channels of their choice. Allow them to interact with the content and community in a variety of ways:

  • Subscribe to channels
  • Like/dislike videos
  • Comment on videos
  • Review and rate
  • Share links to free video on websites
  • Share the screen
  • Live chat

• Payments. On-site payments are indispensable for user retention. Users can pay by PayPal or by their debit/credit card. The two payment models are:

  • Pay to get access to gated content (pay-per-view)
  • Pay monthly subscription from your page

  This can be technically implemented by integrating PayPal via Braintree or Stripe.

Video creators should be treated lavishly to the best tools to make their stay pleasant and rewarding. They will need access to a creative studio and user analytics.

• Video upload and ingestion. Help transfer video from their multiple devices onto your site with video upload. Video ingestion allows the receiver of the video to take it in and process it for further use. Use the studio in a variety of ways:
  • Upload files from the desktop and mobile devices
  • Capture videos from the webcam
  • Create screen recordings in real-time
  • Launch live web events
  • Create video presentations with synchronized video and slides
  • Import directly from YouTube at the click of a button
  • Edit the recording
• Video management. Managing a media library, even a large one, should be simple and straightforward. Content creators will benefit from tools to organize videos and metadata, easily search media, edit the information, moderate, create playlists, etc.
• Analytics. Provide the creators with a comprehensive tracking system to measure the engagement.

Admin role will boost your platform’s credibility.

1. They are miles ahead of you. So how can you catch up with an established video streaming service by using the same tools?
2. They started a while ago. Technology evolves, and there are smarter, cheaper, more efficient solutions on the market.
3. The circumstances are always unique. And so is your business model.

your goal is to find a toolset that provides unique advantages for your project.

Understand a streaming website architecture

server component distribution component client software

Study the video streaming server requirements

• reliable storage
• good network connectivity
• high bandwidth
• low jitter
• reasonable latency
• security

Reliable storage

• Use an SSD storage to keep the newest and most popular videos at the fastest reach. Obviously, you can keep all your data at SSDs, however that may cost some top dollars.
• Use a less powerful (and cheaper) storage type to host the remaining, less popular video data.

Good network connectivity

• Helps prevent server overload
• Shorter request response time
• Smaller probability of packet loss

how to choose a CDN

High bandwidth

13 Mbps 15 Mbps 25 Mbps

Low jitter

adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming ‘Pensieve’

Reasonable latency characteristics

‘live’ What latency is reasonable when it comes to live streaming? So how to deliver low latency streaming?

• Encoding protocol and device/player compatibility
• Audience size and geographic distribution
• Video resolution and complexity

Security

• Network background – a dependable CDN to guarantee global presence and instantaneous connection; 24/7 monitoring and backup to provide content availability in case of a server failure.
• Token security – to prevent content redirection to a 3rd-party source without the owner’s approval.
• Domain restriction. A feature called referers allows to lock content to a specific domain. It prevents seeing the embedded link in the source code and so it cannot be embedded into another site.
• Geographical restriction – you may want to exclude certain locations for copyright and licensing agreement reasons.
• Watermarking – gives an added level of live stream security in the sense that you maintain rights to your own content.
• Viewer payment security. You will need full SSL encryption of transactions done via your paywall. This sort of encryption provides a series of checks to ensure safety of user payment data.

Dig into video streaming protocols

video streaming protocol video compression technology adaptive bitrate (ABR) protocols low latency

RTMP

Real-time messaging protocol

pros	cons
- Best for live streaming - Provides very low latency streams - Robust and almost universally supported	- Insecure for video delivery - Costly for CDN, since it works without caching - Encryption prone to MITM attacks - No native support on iOS
When to use: A perfect streaming and data-sharing solution to use between clients that have flash player

MPEG-DASH

Moving Picture Experts Group Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) licensing reasons

pros	cons
- Supports ABR streaming - Codec agnostic - Supports EME - HTML5 support - AI-driven transcoding algorithm	- Cannot support H.265 (HEVC licensing issue)
When to use: Promising in the near future (as soon as the next-gen video codec AV1 is released)

HLS

HTTP Live Streaming (HLS)

pros	cons
- Supports ABR streaming - New! Supports H.265 codec which delivers twice the video quality at the same file size as H.264; and offers more cool improvements! - HTML5 support	- Relatively high latency - Platform dependent (best performance on iOS only)
When to use: Safest bet to-date for scaling a live stream to large audiences

WebRTC – real-time communication technology of the future

no downloads or plugins no additional client‐end software beyond a standard web browser WebRTC (Web Real Time Communication)

three main APIs:

• MediaStream. Responsible for enabling web browser to receive audio and video signal from cameras or user’s desktop.
• RTCPeerConnection. Responsible for the connection between browsers to exchange media data received from a camera, microphone or user’s desktop. Its ‘duties’ also include signal processing (cleaning it up from background noise, adjusting the microphone level) and controlling audio and video codecs used.
• RTCDataChannel. Responsible for two-way data transmission through the established connection.

RTCP-feedback ideal for live streaming where low latency is a must

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