Build a UGC Live Streaming App with Amazon IVS: Intro to Real-Time with Amazon IVS (Lesson 4.1)

In this lesson, we'll introduce real-time streaming with Amazon IVS. You'll learn some new terminology, and after this lesson you will understand the difference between traditional low-latency streams and real-time streams.

Prior to real-time streaming, live streams on Amazon IVS relied on HLS to deliver high quality video with low-latency. Depending on how the Amazon IVS channel is configured, and the device and network capabilities of the viewer, HLS is capable of delivering up to 1080p quality video with usually under five seconds of latency. For most streams, this much latency is perfectly acceptable. However, more and more customers and use-cases are demanding real-time latency from their live streaming platform, which simply isn’t possible with traditional HLS delivery. One such use case is social user generated content (UGC) live streaming applications like StreamCat.

To give broadcasters the ability to host a stream with real-time latency, we can use Amazon IVS real-time streaming which uses WebRTC instead of HLS for broadcasting up to 720p video from multiple hosts to thousands of viewers with as low as 300ms latency.

The introduction of real-time live streams on Amazon IVS comes with a set of new terminology that is used throughout the AWS console and documentation. Let's define these terms so that you're familiar with them when you hear them in future videos in this course, or when reading through the Amazon IVS documentation.

Real-time live streams can be configured as a full "end-to-end" real-time stream. This means that your broadcast can include multiple hosts, and users can participate in the real-time stream in a "viewer" capacity.

Another option with real-time streaming is to have a host utilize a stage to communicate with other hosts in real-time, but broadcast to viewers over traditional HLS where real-time latency is not required for the viewers.

The configuration that you choose depends on your application's needs. In the following lessons, we'll learn how StreamCat offers both of these options to users by utilizing the Web Broadcast SDK.

In this lesson, we introduced real-time streaming with Amazon IVS. In the next lesson we'll see how to generate a participant token which is needed for all real-time stream participants.