Build a UGC Live Streaming App with Amazon IVS: Broadcast Low-Latency with Multi-Hosts (Lesson 4.4)

In this lesson, we'll see how to broadcast a real-time stream with multiple hosts to an Amazon IVS low-latency channel. As we've covered in previous lessons, real-time streaming with Amazon IVS gives a host the ability to interact with other remote hosts, but sometimes that real-time latency is not necessary for the viewers. The Amazon IVS Web Broadcast SDK makes streaming a real-time conversation to a low-latency channel very easy, so we can add low-latency to a real-time stream with very minimal code and effort.

As we saw earlier in this course, there are times when your application requires real-time video to enable multiple hosts to broadcast together, but low-latency (2-5 seconds) is acceptable (or desired) for viewers. In lesson 4.3, we saw how StreamCat enables real-time streams. In this short lesson, we'll see how to take the composite view that we created in that lesson and broadcast it to a low-latency channel.

If you recall, each user has a Channel that stores information about their Amazon IVS channel. This object stores the ingestEndpoint and streamKey.

To broadcast a real-time stream, StreamCat retrieves the user's channel, and calls startBroadcast() on the broadcastClient, passing it the channel's streamKey and ingestEndpoint.

And that is it. That's all that has to be added to our real-time broadcasting view to send the composite view to the user's Amazon IVS low-latency channel.

In this lesson, we learned how to broadcast a real-time stream to an Amazon IVS low-latency channel. This concludes lesson 4. In lesson 5, we'll look at creating public "channel" pages for live stream playback.