Livepeer Video Services Lets Vimm Make Streaming a Team Sport

“More than 35% of all Twitch streamers broadcast to 0 viewers,” Ryan Juel, Chief Operations Officer at Vimm says. “There’s no community.” As live-streaming has taken off, early streaming platforms have become monolithic, an amalgamation of isolated streams. Vimm seeks to remedy this by building a better community, one that plays, talks, and watches together.

“Our big thing,” Juel says, “has always been that we want people to be able to make the content that they want to make, and share it to their communities, be it as a podcast, by playing video games, making music, or a number of other things. We care about community building on Vimm.  We want our streamers to build and grow, and we make available the tools necessary to achieve this goal.”

One such tool is stream subscriptions. Subscriptions are arbitrarily blocked for users on Twitch, dangled as a carrot to lock users into a contract that is not favorable for them. “We, respectfully, disagree with this sentiment,” said Juel. “We make subscriptions available to anyone who streams on Vimm, because we want streamers to earn the support of their communities they deserve. It doesn’t make sense to restrict a growth opportunity to a select few when so many people stand to benefit from it. Our users love it, too. They’re telling their friends, and it’s helped Vimm grow!”

But in order to handle so many concurrent streams, the Vimm team knew they’d need a transcoding provider that was both powerful and cost-efficient. “We were struggling getting reasonably priced stable ingest servers. Streams would buffer between ingest regions. We really needed a CDN,” Juel says. “We looked at AWS cloud servers, adding a CDN through some other platforms, all were expensive. And then the team found Livepeer.”

“Offering transcoding, CDN, and network of ingest servers, all inhouse bundled under one package, was a strong selling point for Livepeer.,” Juel says. “Then we played with the pricing calculator, and thought, "this is way lower than anything else we can get anywhere."

The team made the switch, and found Livepeer’s integration to be smoother than expected. “We’ve been loving it...The early issues were very minor, and easy to resolve. The availability of servers has been great. A lot of companies are inflexible with their availability and willingness to meet. Livepeer Video Services has always been available when we’ve needed to talk.”

Now, with a quickly growing user base and hosting dozens of concurrent streams daily, Juel says users are happier since the Livepeer integration. "People have noticed that we have transcoding. That was a feature they'd been asking about, but couldn't afford...it’s everything we’ve been looking for.”

To learn more about how Livepeer Video Services can help you and your business, get in touch at hello@livepeer.com.