PlayDJ, bringing DJ’s into people's homes during lockdown

PlayDJ.tv, a newly launched user-generated music platform, gives DJs the ability to stream and more personally interact with listeners. The platform was created as a full service solution for DJs to host licensed streaming and to use innovative features such as tipping, paid entry, and private streams to monetize their work. In turn, PlayDJ.tv gives music lovers on-demand, access-anywhere streams of their favorite DJs.

PlayDJ launched in April 2020 and experienced an immediate exponential growth in users. They acquired thousands of users in a matter of weeks, which brought with it complex scaling challenges.

At that time, PlayDJ.tv was reliant on existing cost-prohibitive streaming platforms to fulfill the increase in user demand. These streaming and transcoding companies’ unsustainable pricing structures and time-consuming integration processes became a serious barrier for growth. Faced with unsustainable costs, PlayDJ was forced to shut down their service for several weeks and rethink how to build an economically viable video centric creator platform.

To scale and match increasing demand, they needed a partner that would be able to help them implement the service quickly, provide infinite scalability and reliability, and offer a pricing model that would significantly reduce costs. The cost savings could then be re-invested into their business to support innovation and drive growth.

Their solution - use Livepeer.com as their transcoding provider. Livepeer, a forward-thinking video transcoding solution, takes advantage of decentralization to offer clients a service that is 10x more affordable than existing offerings. PlayDJ.tv was able to integrate Livepeer.com into their infrastructure within days to avoid expensive hardware investments and achieve what they were not able to do with traditional transcoding platforms - a 10x reduction in transcoding costs, seamless scalability given a growing user base, and easy API integration.

Had PlayDJ.tv continued to use more expensive traditional transcoding providers, it is likely that they would have not been able to offer their DJ’s a compelling service including free and low cost options.  This would have restricted their product offerings, minimized their user base, and stunted their growth as a company.

With Livepeer.com’s backing, PlayDJ.tv is today able to provide high-quality and reliable streaming services to viewers and content creators at a price point that will allow them to scale without compromising on quality or user experience.