Decode the Development Code Of An App Like Twitch

Lori Caricofe
App Development Company
11 min readApr 24, 2020

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What would be your pick?

Most of us will choose a movie over reading a book because video is more engaging and more memorable than text. That’s the only reason why — our brain process visuals 60,000 times faster. Also, 90% of the total information transmitted to our brain is visual.

The big names and owners of video-streaming platforms are unaware to think about these whopping figures and stats. But, the fact is, the live streaming video industry is predicted to reach $25, 894 million dollars in 2020 accompanied by a CAGR (2020–2024) 4.1% resulting in the market value of $30, 410 million by 2024.

However, if you have decided to jump on the bandwagon and build a live-streaming app like Twitch, this is the right place for you to be. Below, I have shared a comprehensive guide on how to create an app like Twitch, inclusive the development steps and cost.

Understanding Twitch and It’s Working

Twitch dwells from an online space, which is gaining momentum at the moment. That’s why the elephants of the technology market with the right app development company are increasingly creating video streaming apps and websites. And, these startups have every chance to act on the upthrust with the right approach to the issue.

As you already know, the popularity of video streaming resources is pretty ubiquitous — online conferences, live workshops, webinars, virtual interviews, all have become an unskippable part of our lives.

“We” as an ordinary individual, cherish all the possibilities of live broadcasts, and on the same note companies taking advantage of this present trends of attracting new clients and deepening relations with the older ones.

An out of the ordinary example is the “TWITCH RESOURCES”: According to Similarweb, it records about 300–500 million visits in a single month all across the world. Whereas, in December 2016, the index reached a whopping number of 524.4 million. And, these impressive figures characterize not only the demand for such a remarkable and successful streaming site but also the high revenue bars of its owners.

The Unbelievable Revolution Of Twitch

Twitch.Tv is a reputed online streaming platform where users are able to watch live streaming videos or recorded videos.

Let’s rewind a little and start with its inception in 2011 as a small platform for live video streaming called Justin.tv. Meanwhile, at the same time, Justin Kahn, the platform founder, received $ 8 million in venture investments for platform development.

In February 2014, Justin.tv was once re-name as Twitch Interactive, and in August 2014, the service was acquired by Amazon for $970 million. Now, Twitch gets around 15 million daily active users and counts over 27,000 partner channels.

While players are broadcasting videos, they commonly add audio comments through a webcam appearing in the corner of the screen. Also, platform users are involved in live chat with gamers who carry the same interests. Such interactive chatting sessions create a real-life social experience in the digitalized arena, especially for the web developers in Dubai.

However, Twitch users use the platform for several other purposes more than video game live streaming:

Twitch hosts E-tournaments and soon to be coming games demos.
The platform users use twitch for video game tutorials, when many users can interact with each other and the instructors in real-time.

Also, Twitch act as a software development learning environment where users communities stream programming projects and communicate through work.

Aside from the gaming, Twitch also has non-gaming features like — IRL (In Real Life), talk Shows, Creative Sessions, and even for the foodies they have cooking classes too.

Now, Is The Time To Unfurl Twitch Business Model

The Twitch business model includes the following revenue sources:

Advertising — Twitch charges a cost per mile (CPM) fee from gaming firms, portals, and the right developers for running advertisements. The value of CPM ranges between $2-$10.

Subscription — The respective Twitch users can make a purchase from the following options of $4.99, $9.99, and $24.99/ month. A paid subscription allows users to watch videos without ads and use premium twitch features. Twitch Premium features consist of an expanded emoticon set, personalized chat username colors, priority customer support, and the list goes on.

Partners — To brace your favorite streamers, twitch users buy paid subscription for some specified channels. Twitch splits the subscription costing into half with the channel owner.

Doesn’t it all sound exciting?

Indeed, it’s worth considering how to make a live streaming website or an app, right!

Xicom is here for your rescue with undiscovered benefits for you.

The Undiscovered Benefits Of App like Twitch

Presently, is the high time to dive a little deeper to have a look at other business verticals that can benefit from live video streaming.

Does live-streaming the ideal choice for your business?

The Twitch instance shows the user live-streaming is an industry aspect for more than only streaming games. So before you make up your mind to hire a web developer for your project, make sure to have a look at other perspective spheres:

Education — This is the most significant niche for live video streaming. According to the university of Dartmouth, 86% of universities and colleges have a presence on youtube. Thus, you can build a live video streaming website or app to stream live lessons to extend the student’s classroom experience.

Conferences — Approximately, 67% of viewers are probable to purchase a ticket after watching live streaming of the same event. You can develop a live-streaming platform to stream scientific conferences or some other industry-specific events.

Online Retailing — A share of 40% customers say live videos of products leave a product impression on their clients purchase decision. Therefore, e-commerce is another industry where retailers can go live with their products and conduct see-now-buy-now strategies.

Concerts — Festivals and concerts make upto 43% of frequently watched live content. Also, 30% of individuals who watch a live stream event will attend in-person the following year too.

In total, more than 4.6 million people watch music festivals via live streaming each year. Thus, you can commence a live streaming business to stream music festivals.

Healthcare — Live-streaming in the healthcare industry can benefit in different ways. By utilizing the live video, doctors can organize training sessions or guide surgeons during a surgical medical procedure. Also, live-streaming allows for direct communication of patients with healthcare professionals to diagnose treatment.

Gaming — The roleplay of live-streaming in this industry is significant. By creating a live-streaming game website, you may accomplish a maximum number of users, maximize user engagement, and create a loyal gaming community.

Fitness — A fitness live-streaming website where coaches and health diet specialists share their experience is yet another perspective nook. A live-streaming website or app would for sure help your business to attract new customers and build loyalty among the exciting ones.

Twitch With “No Stopping Sign” For Growth

Twitch success is evident… and some may think it’s time to stop and rest — but No! The company keeps emerging and developing in order to meet the requirements of the clients and markets. And today, Twitch proffers a solution aimed not only at gamers.

Similar other features, the just chatting functionality has won popularity — it’s a platform enabling streamers to converse with the audience seamlessly.

In a single word, Twitch is a real gem for people in the business. A billion revenue without much effort! Moreover — a real success story…

The Role Of Apps & Websites Like Twitch

Without any doubt, streaming videos are an innovative way to communicate and interact with the modern world. Their uniqueness adheres to the fact that they don’t need your personal presence to interact with each other. Besides, users love the opportunity to participate in any cool global event whenever it’s easily feasible — of course, remotely.

So, the upsurging demand is quite explainable, and it stays to provide a supply, namely, a web resource with the video content of impeccable quality. That’s precisely what Twitch has done by providing a great and successful streaming website solution.

Do you think what’s more?

Twitch didn’t stop at small and similarly occupied a unique nook: it became an online broadcasting platform, popularly known as (Twitch.tv) for the hard-to-reach customers or gamers. Earlier, famous brands couldn’t act as the sheath for the entire audience, because of its representative aren’t really interested in anything but just the gameplay. They don’t like reading, TV shows, watching movies, just nothing at all!
Thus, apps and websites like Twitch turned out to be of great help to the gamers to deal with!

Nevertheless, games are not the only scope of use of live streaming video resources. The top mobile app development companies in Dubai advice their clients to feel free to find their own niche, which further will be made into an operational reality with the tips to help you with the uneasy matter.

Essential Technical Features To Integrate Streaming Videos

How to begin with a live streaming video? To answer these questions, the experts have figured out what video streaming is.

Data streaming means that the media files are compressed, chunked into parts and sequentially transmitted to a user. The size of the packet is evaluated by the bandwidth of the network session or via a communication channel between the client and server transmitting the video signal. By collecting a sufficient number of packets in the buffer, the client’s programs start to playback one of them-similarly, its receiving and performing decompression of the next packages.

The core purpose of the buffer is to make sure smooth and continuous playback of the video signal. It’s pretty challenging to understand if you don’t dwell from the same field or are a newbie to the trade, but all these discussed factors are essential for live video streaming web development.

Therefore, the web developer in Dubai enlist the below listed features essential for a successful live streaming website:

Player (Flash media player, HTML5 video player, VLC player; video codecs: H.264, H.263, VP6; audio codecs: MP3, AAC).

The video encoder (Flash Media Live Encoder, Telestream WireCast, Haivision KulaByte Encoders, Microsoft Expression Encoder Pro, Flash web app);

Media server (Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server, Wowza Streaming Server, Red5 (free), Erlyvideo (free), Microsoft IIS Media Services, RealNetworks Helix Universal Server);

Step-By-Step Instruction To Create A Live Video Streaming App

The live streaming market is flooded, so you should provide an incredibly high-quality product. We are here for your helpful tips.

Okay, by now you must have decided to create a video streaming website.

What should you be doing next?

Accessibility — Firstly, determine who will be allowed to begin video streaming. There are some possible options:
You might be the only one to have such access.
All registered users are permissible to create streaming videos for free.
Users are allowed to make streaming videos content if they have the subscription (after the free trial)

Functionality — To accelerate and earn a good deal of money, remember — your resource should meet and satisfy the clients requirements as much as possible. Else, users are probable to become a source of your income.
So, your video streaming services must have:
Provide each streamer with his own video channel,
Have a live chat feature (indispensable one for alluring streamers to website)
Protects channels. Only the owner should access it,
Allow streamers to customize the video content as per need.

  1. Licensed Help — The time you hire web developer make sure they embed videos through different devices and receive files of different formats without much hassle. But in some scenarios, you should make sure that these streaming videos are shown on the platform in higher quality.
    The good part is you don’t have to get confused to implement the task properly.
    The solution is already here!
    We recommend you Wozwa technology from Amazon EC2. you have permission.
  2. Think Ahead Of Time — Also, proficients advise you to think in advance and provide a perspective for the server scaling. In simpler words, you should build a website able to scale the same heights. Else, in the coming years, you will face a number of problems.
    However, if you are not planning to develop a project of Twitch level, you can cope on your own, but if you don’t want to compete with Twitch, then another choice is recommending using CDN. You may have to pay a license, but investments are justified. Using the CDN provides many benefits, not least of which is pre-caching of video files, so that the user doesn’t need to download them, and localized data centres.
  3. Dominant hosting — Selecting a reliable hosting is always tricky, but the issues become more burning if you are planning to create a successful live streaming videos website like Twitch.
  4. Impressive Design — Just keep sure to not use ready-made solutions if you want to get an efficient and effective web tool to make good money. The inventive and modern design is half way to your success! And, you see now why experts advise ordering services of experienced UX designers and Front-end developers. This is not the time to penny-pinching.
  5. Storing video archives — Yes! It’s crucial to save your videos and store archives received. The task is more complicated than it seems at first instance.
    Why?
    There are possibly two reasons.
    First — Video content should not be distorted or mutilated during the process.
    Secondly — Make sure that the videos can easily be “taken out” on the user request and displayed correctly.
    Advisable for creating the second dedicated storages — A powerful SSD-Store is consisting of the most popular files, and an affordable one containing all the rest. The described system is the most effective and economically beneficial.

We have discussed by now how to develop a video streaming website. Yet another important question is

“How Much Does It Cost To Develop A Live Streaming App”

Everything comes along with a price tag, and Xicom aims to make sure the bars of revenue exceed manifold the initial expenditures and investments. So, having detailed guidelines and protocols on video streaming website development, the unskippable step is to partner with the pioneer in the self-acclaimed top web development companies in the Dubai.

As it’s impossible to decide the development cost, it all depends on the specific technology stacks and project requirements. However, approximate calculations can be made, which is what we have shed some light on each stage of creating video streaming services like Twitch.
Here is Xicom’s Analysis:

UX/UI design — It consists of creating a UX Map, which is a detailed informational structure of your resource, UI research to evaluate the right way to visualize the idea, as well as prototyping a future site.

Website development — The meticulous procedures of creating the site structure, building features, adding required libraries, and many other tasks are included under this category.

The Backend infrastructure — It implies server system configuration, APIs integration, and many other crucial steps to make your site work as it should and that with a full capacity.

Admin panel — It consists of developing an admin panel to allow you to manage the resource at the finest level of accessibility.

Thus, the total estimate of project development varies to 1500 hours. Ultimately, you want a top-notch product capable of generating behemoth profit.

Are you still sitting on the fence to hire web developers in Dubai for your next big?

Don’t be!

We have a fair amount of experience in developing mobile and web apps with a pocket-friendly costing of $25–49/hr. And the best part is Your Free Project Estimation.

Originally published at https://www.xicom.ae on April 24, 2020.

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Lori Caricofe
App Development Company

Software tester by profession. Fast learner, Passionate about tech. Good sense of humour, & Enjoy challenges!