Live streaming apps have gained major applause and popularity in recent times, and now could be better than ever to launch your own live streaming app. If you have an idea that can change the way people see live-streaming, or make it a part of their routine, you should definitely think about a live streaming app.
We have built various apps over time and we can certainly say the RoI and popularity of live-streaming apps have been one of the tops amongst other categories. There are various ways you can go with live streaming app development, and we will walk you through the process in this blog.
The entire process in divided into 3 steps or phases, but the most important one is choosing the features you want in your app. What truly makes your app stand out is something you need to know before moving ahead. Our team of consultants can help you with it through and through from their experience in building various viral apps.
Table of Contents
Steps To Develop a Live Streaming App
A live-streaming app makes up for a majority of apps people use daily these days. Targeting this niche opens up a wide world of possibilities, enabling wider reach and audiences. If you are planning to create your own live streaming app, now could be better than ever, given the advancement and future possibilities. So, let’s begin with how to develop a live streaming app.
Step 1: Making a List of Features
The idea behind the app, the list of features you want in it are two things that make your app different from 1000s of competitors. You need to get this step right in order to stand out from the apps that are out there. The core idea, combined with best-in-class feature offerings, along with an intuitive UI/UX, are the perfect recipe for a successful application. Below is a list of features most associated with good live streaming applications.
Behavior Tracking
While it may sound out of the way in a video streaming app, you will need this feature to make it big. No matter where your app idea is focused, behavior tracking enables you to generate a better match engine for your app. If you are planning a live stream app, you will certainly need this feature to ensure you can show perfect matches according to the liking of your users.
Recommendations
While any app can make recommendations, it is all about making sense with it. A user may search for something but really want to see something else; we make such recommendations happen. The primary goal to achieve with this feature is showing people videos they would be interested in, rather than bombarding them with irrelevant videos which would want them to leave.
Analytics and Insights
The best way to improve a live streaming platform is analytics and insights. Your app should be made in a way to generate these reports as it evolves. The apps we created in the past were highly optimized using analytics and insights, and we can make that happen for you. No matter how you get your app developed, you should always include functionality for reports on various factors within the app.
Filters
The filter has been hugely popular in the social media community, and you should definitely include them in your app. However, this requires intricate machine learning and AR and would take up a good number of resources to build. If you plan to implement this feature in your app, we would best suggest implementing it perfectly or not at all. Although, a live streaming app can be way more fun with some AR-based filters.
Video Effects
Video effects while live streaming may seem far-fetched but can be implemented in a subtle way. Things like audio overlapping may be the key to success in this world already full of live-streaming apps. You can go ahead and even include an option to make snips from popular moments of stream, enabling users to edit and post them directly wherever they want.
Recording
While this may seem a very easily implementable feature, recording 4K streams can be a very heavy feature to implement. You can also include notifications when someone else records it, giving the streamer an extra layer of security. Even though it would make the app heavier, this feature is a must include in your app, as many streamers prefer to keep their videos recorded.
Chat Rooms
If you want, you can include chatrooms based on user preferences. All of them would have a feature to start a watch party, where room owners or mutually decided streamers can start streaming to all users in the chatroom. This feature can really help you stand out from the rest of the apps out there, making yours unique and worth trying out.
Multiplatform Support
While building an app for your live stream idea is great, you should also focus on a website or desktop app to ensure everyone can join in. Live streaming isn’t limited to mobile phones in any way or form, so keep in mind that you have to provide multiplatform support. It is up to you if you want a website or web app, or desktop app, but you do need to offer one to ensure everyone can use your app to full scale.
Step 2: The Development Part
Before considering developing a live streaming app, you need to figure out the basics. The features, the team size you would require, the type of app you need to build, and more. In usual cases, your mobile app development company would consult you for everything, but since knowing a bit about app development never hurt anybody, it is better to go in with the experience of what you would be needing.
The major decisions you need to make include:
The Platforms to target for your Mobile App
As stated above, you really need to think it through before starting to build your app. If not done the right way, the number of platforms to target can exponentially increase the cost and time to develop. While all we can tell you right now is that everything is possible, you need to plan out what you can do about including most platforms and what price that comes at. You have two choices when it comes to building apps:
1. Native Applications: These are separate applications for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and others. While the mobile app only usually focuses on iOS and Android, as we stated above, you would probably need to keep the focus on desktop apps too. A native app is built for a single platform, so you would need four separate apps for all stated above. There are workarounds around it, and you can build a website for desktop or move on to cross-platform app development.
2. Cross-platform Application Development: These apps are built by reusing a majority of coding done for the app; these applications work on every platform with just basic tweaking. This can be perfect for your use case, but there is still a catch here, you won’t be able to implement heavy features in cross-platform apps. While they cost less and will be built in much less time, they compromise performance, which is something you need for 4K recording and AR-based filters.
Choosing Team Members for Live Streaming app’s Development
A team or a mobile app development company is who you are going to need to actually build your application. While it may seem easy at first, it is actually a long and demanding process where you need to be involved if you want a personal touch in your app.
Companies like ours follow Agile methodology, where we involve the client at every milestone and make changes per their feedback, continually improving things. The team you would need should include:[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
A Project Manager
Native or Cross-platform App Developers
UI/UX Experts
QA and Testers
Digiatal Marketers
Technology Stack
Depending on the features you need and the platform you plan to target, a suitable technology would check all boxes. The hard part is, it isn’t so simple to figure out without keeping everything in mind.
The technology you choose will highly affect who you hire and the cost and time to develop the app.
It is one of the most important choices you will make. If you hire a mobile app development company, you might go with any technology. But if you plan to hire yourself, make sure to choose the one for which you can easily find developers.
Native App Development
- Swift (iOS development)
- Android Studio (Android development)
Cross-platform App Development
- React Native (Cross-platform development framework)
- Flutter (Cross-platform development framework)
- Ionic (Cross-platform development framework)
- Xamarin (Cross-platform development framework)
Data Analytics Tools
- Python
- Java
- Amazon EC2
- Amazon S3
- Kafka
- Scala
- Amazon VPC
- Amazon EMR
- Apache Impala
Utilities
- Elastic Search
DevOps
- Chef
- AWS CloudFormation
Databases
- Aerospike
- MongoDB
- Cassandra
- HBase
- MySQL
- Postgre
Step 3: Who to hire?
Setting up your own team
This will easily be the toughest and costliest way to build your app and is going to certainly burn a hole in your pocket. We don’t recommend it as it involves setting up a whole team, hiring a team on a full-time basis, office rent, and whatnot. It is always better to hire once you are sure that the app is going to work or the initial release has gained momentum.
Hire freelance developers
Hiring freelancers from around the world can let you save money but somewhat ensures delays and quality compromise to a great extent. You would only want to go this way in combination with the two other options states, as hiring freelancers won’t make much sense.
Hire a Mobile app development company
As a mobile app development company, we can assure you the quality to cost ratio is highest when you hire us. Not only do we have experienced developers who have already built live-streaming apps, but we also have experience in AR and different futuristic technologies. We can implement the features you want, that too in your budget.
Are you ready to develop your live streaming app?
We hope we have given you a well-enough idea of how developing your live streaming app would look like and the steps it would involve. If you want a perfect app, we will build one for you. Our experts are going to create a perfect live streaming app, ensuring it checks all boxes when it comes to perfection.
We at Matellio believe in giving our clients the absolute best, the best pricing, best app, best service. If you are planning to hire a mobile app development company, share your requirements, and we will get back to you with a quote soon.
