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17LIVE is a rapidly growing live streaming platform and company based in Taiwan. Since its inception in 2015, it has expanded operations to Japan and gained immense popularity among young people. Typically, there were 3 key applications aimed at providing 17LIVE with additional monetization opportunities. They are 17LIVE (Live Streaming), WAVE (Audio Streaming) and Hands up (E-commerce live streaming). Fast forwarding to January-December 2020 and 2021, data.ai reports that the number of downloads and sales from 17LIVE during in January-December 2020 and 2021 make the company Japan’s largest live-streaming platform.
As the platform gained momentum, it faced challenges of delivering high-quality live streaming content to millions of users while ensuring a seamless user experience for all of them. From the company’s inception, CDNetworks has been 17LIVE’s long-term partner, applying world-leading streaming media technologies to resolve every streaming media challenge faced in 17LIVE’s streaming evolution.
As 17LIVE’s user-base grew, the company encountered various challenges and pain points that needed to be addressed to sustain and enhance its live streaming services. Here are a few of them.
Infrastructure Limitations Hindering Global Growth: With a mission to “empower human connections through live technology,” 17LIVE has always prioritized serving its global user base. To achieve this, 17LIVE required a CDN provider that could offer a robust network infrastructure to ensure uninterrupted growth of its live streaming business, especially in regions such as China that have their own unique network transmission requirements and regulations.
Streaming Performance Optimization: With large user base spanning multiple countries, ensuring smooth and low-latency streaming performance became crucial for 17LIVE because it ensured a positive interactive user experience with the three apps mentioned above. Increasing the user base on those three apps translated directly into greater profits, which further underscored the importance that CDNetworks was able to provide in terms of reliable performance under different network conditions and across various devices.
Demands of Diverse Interactive Features: To make live streaming both interactive and entertaining, the three apps previously mentioned presented CDNetworks’ Media Delivery Solutions with extremely high requirements when it came to functionality. These requirements were critical for increasing 17LIVE user engagements with, and traffic growth for, its platform by using intuitive ways to attract users to content, such as with content thumbnails or short videos.
Mounting Content Surveillance & Archive Workload：With the number of platform users and live streamers increasing at unprecedented rates, the daily workload for moderating and archiving content on the 17LIVE platform has increased significantly. This tremendous growth made it impossible to moderate content manually in real-time. As a result, 17LIVE was in needed of a solution that could moderate and archive content while, at the same time, improve the efficiencies of operation and reduce manpower expenses.
Challenges in Addressing Round-the-Clock Issues: As a round-the-clock live streaming platform, 17LIVE requires round-the-clock support services to address any issues that may arise at any time.
To meet these challenges, 17LIVE chose CDNetworks for its tailored solutions.
With over 2,800 Points of Presence in more than 70 countries and regions worldwide, CDNetworks provides high-quality CDN and streaming distribution services for 17LIVE, giving the company a competitive edge in the market.
Moreover, CDNetworks went the extra mile by offering its China Premium Service (CPS) to guarantee stable network connections between China’s influential key opinion leaders (KOLs) and their global audience. This CPS solution established a direct and secure connection tunnel between Mainland China and Hong Kong, eliminating the need for reliance on the public internet route. As a result, CDNetworks’ Advanced CPS helped 17LIVE reduce streaming latencies by approximately 75% compared to general routes and significantly enhanced the streaming performance of 17LIVE’s KOLs in China, allowing for seamless streaming even without going through the cumbersome ICP filing process.
Thanks to CPS, 17LIVE was able to recruit some KOLs from China to provide more quality content for its global viewers.
Advanced CPS vs General Route
| Service | Avg. Latency | Response Availability | Avg. Webpage Response Time | PoP Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Advanced CPS | 50ms | 99% | 190ms | Hong Kong |
| General Route | 200ms | 60% | 2600ms | Global PoPs |
With over 20 years of CDN video experience, CDNetworks’ extensive expertise is unsurpassed when it comes to supporting streaming media protocols. For example, our FLV live streaming solution reduced content delivery latencies to as low as 3 seconds and supported massive distribution content while offering 17LIVE unrivaled cost-effectiveness. These benefits made the FLV live streaming solution an excellent fit for our 17LIVE, which required uninterrupted live streaming around the clock. Our FLV solution also helped 17LIVE balance user experience and cost. Moreover, CDNetworks stands out amongst numerous CDN vendors with the support of FLV large volume distribution.
“Unlike streaming solutions from other CDN vendors, CDNetworks supports FLV large-volume distribution. This cost-effective solution allows us to offer live streaming services with latencies as low as 3 seconds, ensuring a truly seamless and real-time interaction between our streamers and viewers.” – Andy Tseng, Sr. Engineering Director at 17LIVE
In addition to superior low-latency streaming performance, CDNetworks equipped 17LIVE with a number of ancillary features, including screenshot, recording, and storage functions. These features not only enhance the visual effects of the company’s user interface, but also create a truly immersive user experience.
Furthermore, CDNetworks offered a comprehensive content moderate mechanism that was customized for 17LIVE to efficiently manage its platform content. Using this mechanism, 17LIVE can easily manage live streaming archives and block streams promptly based on automatically generated moderator result. This capability enhanced management operations of the live streaming platform and minimized any potential negative impact on the 17LIVE brand image.
To help our valued customer, 17LIVE, create a seamless end-to-end user interactive experience, CDNetworks utilized various transcoding techniques to convert live streams into lower bitrates to adapt to varying network conditions and a wide range of screen sizes on end user devices in various content scenarios.
| Streamer | Scenario | Transcoding Output |
|---|---|---|
| Streamer from PC client (Start from 8K, 4K, 2K, 1080P) | Music event, E-commerce activity… | 1080P, 720P, Others |
| Streamer from Mobile Phone client (Start from 2K, 1080P) | SHOW, Personal streamer… | 1080P, 720P,480P, 360P |
As a rapidly growing startup, 17LIVE faced wide-ranging technical issues of Media Delivery and CDN. In particular, 17LIVE needed CDNetworks to provide multidimensional and real-time support. To that end, CDNetworks formed a dedicated work group to provide comprehensive services that included business analysis, instant message services, policy customization and optimization, configuration validation, emergency response, and proactive optimization. CDNetworks also arranged periodic business reviews for 17LIVE to boost iterations of its key technologies.
“The CDNetworks support team has been incredibly responsive and helpful throughout our partnership. Their 24/7 dedicated support has resolved issues promptly, and their multi-dimensional streaming analytics for businesses provides valuable insights that allow us to continuously improve our streaming performance.” – Andy Tseng, Sr. Engineering Director at 17LIVE
In conclusion, 17LIVE’s success in resolving media delivery and CDN issues can be attributed to its success with CDNetworks. With CDNetworks as its trusted partner, 17LIVE’s business is thriving as it continues to capture, captivate, and engage millions of users across Asia and beyond.