Rooter enhances live stream experiences with Amazon IVS

India’s largest game streaming and esports platform adds HD capabilities, lowers latency to deliver stand-out content and improve monetization

As the platform of choice for India’s most popular gaming and esports live streamers, Rooter has experienced significant growth in the past two years, from 100,000 two years back to more than 1 million in 2022. At any given time, thousands of creators are live on Rooter, and often millions of viewers are collectively tuned into their channels – numbers that can rapidly fluctuate. To continue providing a premium experience, Rooter integrated its platform with Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS), allowing it to offer 1080p (HD) streams.

Explaining the company’s decision, Adhikaar Marwaha, Backend Lead at Rooter said, “Our top creators want to stream at 1080p and we found Amazon IVS to be the best solution for us to do this; nothing else on the market even came close.”

Rooter’s platform was established in 2016, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) playing a key role in cloud-based components of its infrastructure from the outset. It’s built on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), AWS Elemental MediaConvert, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon EventBridge. Amazon IVS extends that robust ecosystem, allowing Rooter to deliver a noticeably improved live stream experience.

Broadcasters are able to stream via Rooter’s Android app or desktop using Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), which ingests and encodes streams using RTMP. Previously on the backend, Rooter used its own servers and built a WebRTC-based solution that leveraged a live streaming platform. The setup required stream conversions to RTMP and HLS, along with other post-processing functions for encoding, and using a CDN, all of which added costs. Also, the maximum resolution available was 480p (SD).

While fulfilling functional requirements, the operational setup needed optimization. Using Amazon IVS reduced Rooter’s steps to delivery, and eliminated the need for a third-party CDN since it was included in the service. Rather than completely replacing its existing setup, Rooter added Amazon IVS alongside it, providing greater flexibility and scale, and freeing resources to focus on ensuring customer satisfaction.

Images courtesy of Rooter

“Since implementing Amazon IVS, our quality of service has definitely increased, and our customers have noticed this,” Marwaha said. “Sometimes we have more than 2,000 simultaneous streams running. Managing that kind of volume on your own can be challenging and can lead to buffering, which isn’t great for anyone. Moving to a managed service has also been hugely beneficial in removing time-consuming aspects of running the platform so we can focus on providing a seamless experience for creators. In addition, the IVS Chat feature is a perfect match for supporting the high-velocity real-time chats that we get on our streams.”

With stream reliability and economic efficiency prioritized for the free platform, Rooter largely spins up Amazon IVS basic channels, which deliver up to 480p resolution. Top creators identified through preset thresholds are given persistent standard channels in Amazon IVS, allowing them to stream at 1080p, with bitrate delivered to the end user optimized for their network connection. Viewers can donate to creators, or purchase e-commerce items through the platform, which is also ad-supported. A further distinguishing feature, Rooter streams are recorded, which is supported in Amazon IVS.

“Amazon IVS is a complete package,” concluded Marwaha. “We can create channels fast and allow people to stream for even short periods of time, all without having to manage it. The downstream benefits are exceptional.”

To learn more about building experiences with live video, check out: https://thinkwithwp.com/ivs/