Case study
Video Conferencing and Online Meeting Platform
We have built a scalable resilient WebRTC-based video streaming platform, developed platform SDKs and implemented various 3rd party software and hardware integrations
Business Challenge
Our client, an interactive virtual events platform with next-generation participants engagement ecosystem, sought to solve their engineering challenges and technical debt that followed the rapid company growth. Mentioned challenges were connected with sporadic video stream quality issues, frequent interruptions, and A/V streams going out of sync, which led to poor UX. Additionally, that platform was not scaling well upon increasing active participant count.
Such endeavor required profound technological capabilities and knowledge in the video streaming domain, which the client lacked. They needed a holistic approach that involves reimaging the streaming system architecture, defining core security, logging, telemetry, and streamlining the deployment processes to decrease time-to-market for new features.
As our client was looking for a reliable technological partner with broad expertise in video streaming software development, quality assurance, SysOps, and DevOps, Plexteq was an excellent choice to meet their needs. Also, due to pressing time constraints, they needed a vendor capable of setting up a team and starting development as soon as possible.
Key Challenges
1
Video stream quality issues, frequent interruptions, streams going out of sync and hence poor UX
2
Existing customers required integrations with the enterprise SIP-enabled conferencing hardware that doesn't support WebRTC
3
Stream QoS and QoE to implement framework for constant quality and customer satisfaction improvement
Solution Delivered
Plexteq gathered a strong engineering team that quickly delved into the project, set up the software development process, and reimagined the video streaming architecture of the product in just 8 months. Following this successful release, Plexteq started supporting our client on many levels and on a constant basis.
3rd Party Integrations
Several customers of our client required various 3rd party integrations with the video streaming solution to extend the connectivity options. Specifically, they needed to join the enterprise-grade conferencing hardware systems that just supported SIP or RTMP protocols.
Our client initially built the video streaming core on OpenSource Licode software, with neither SIP nor RTMP support. So our team has created a solution based on two additional services - Kurento and Drachtio. These OpenSource servers have the required protocol support, and to make use of them in our conferencing solution, our team has built a transparent Licode bridge for them.
Stream QoS and QoE
As the internet is unpredictable and without the right tools to observe and mitigate potential bandwidth fluctuations and limitations, the end-user experience can end up being less than optimal. That is something our client was experiencing as well. In addition, our client's Technical Management Department was missing a clear overview of the QoS aspect of the media streams.
Our team has implemented an analytical module that gathers information about the participant's devices, bandwidths, streaming start time, start failures, bounce rate, error rate, buffer rate, rebuffer time, lag ratio, etc. Furthermore, according to the participant's statistics, this module inputs the WebRTC streaming subsystem to ensure excellent UX for all the participants.
Mobile SDK Development
Mobile application support for video streaming is crucial for the business. Once the client's platform got stabilized by our team and the integration layer with SIP and RTMP devices has been done, we have started the next major milestone to implement native mobile support for iOS and Android devices. Native support was crucial to ensure a high-performance and smooth user experience.
Once the iOS and Android proof-of-concept apps were ready, our team has extracted core streaming, conferencing, signaling, and room management functionality into reusable SDKs written in Objective-C and Java. Our team has built a comprehensive automation test suite to ensure high quality and protect the SDKs from regression defects.
Developed SDK included a range of things, including embeddable libraries/frameworks, documentation, code samples, processes, and guides that 3rd party developers can use and integrate into their apps.
This SDK set allowed to extend the marketing and sales capabilities of the platform as it helped to sell the platform to wide-range of customers who required video streaming capabilities for their apps as a separate feature. Some of the integrations done with 3rd party products we did covered quite complex scenarios with Android TV with NVidia Xavier offload for super-fast H.265 encoding.
CI/CD Setup
Since the start of our collaboration, our Plexteq DevOps team has been progressively enhancing the efficiency and performance of our client’s deployment environment and automated release management. Building deployment-ready artifacts that have undergone rigorous testing procedures have become faster, less costly, and hassle-free. This enhances continuous integration release management and increases release velocity and will eventually improve business results thanks to continuous integration.
Our continuous integration services have translated into:
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Lower test execution costs
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Faster build generation and code releases to production
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Fewer bottlenecks stalling project teams
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Fewer incidents during execution of multiple dependent tests
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Faster incident response
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Prompt and meaningful feedback on incidents and related risks for target audiences
Key Features
Architecture redesign for high performance, high throughput streaming with focus on reliability and QoS/QoE
SIP and RTMP connectors built
CI/CD automation that drastically improved delivery process and decreased TTM
Project Highlights
Industries: Event Platforms
Expertise: Software architecture, video streaming, DevOps
Market: Global
Team size: 8 engineers
Cooperation: 2017 – now
Technologies:
C, C++, Java, Javascript, NodeJS, React, Qt, Kotlin, Swift, ObjectiveC, GStreamer, Kurento, Licode, Drachtio, Websockets, Jenkins, Docker, WebRTC, SIP, RTMP, H.264, H.265, VP8, VP9
Business Outcome
Plexteq has quickly established close cooperation with our client, set up the necessary processes, and provided our client with dedicated engineering resources with unique expertise in the video streaming domain, enabling them to launch several projects simultaneously. Working under pressing schedules, our team managed to meet the deadlines and release well-performing software on time.
We reimagined the video streaming architecture focusing on reliability, high performance, high throughput, and quality. In addition, QoS/QoE solution gave our client complete visibility of customer engagement and helped to tune video streaming backend components to improve UX. Plus, we optimized software build and delivery processes that removed overhead, minimized the development effort, and sped up the time to market.
Plexteq continues to deliver high-quality services, helping our client enter new markets and bring to life their master plan for creating innovations and outstanding user experiences.
