CJ ENM Accelerates Response Times and Delivers Live Customer Chat to Drive Live Commerce

As Korea’s first home shopping broadcaster, CJ ENM leveraged its expertise in shopping and differentiated live commerce production to launch CJ ONSTYLE, a mobile live commerce platform. Since launch, the accumulated value of orders on CJ ONSTYLE has exceeded $70 million (100 billion South Korean won). As CJ ONSTYLE grew, delays to video streams increased when viewer numbers soared. This prompted the company to investigate ways to strengthen real-time communication with viewers, which is the biggest benefit of mobile live commerce.

Kyung-rak Koh, head of Mobile Live Commerce Platform at CJ ENM, says, “Previously, it took up to 30 seconds for a live video stream to transmit footage from the camera to our viewers. This made it difficult to communicate with viewers in real time during live streaming, so we began investigating solutions to rectify this.”

CJ ENM decided to develop an in-house live commerce platform for CJ ONSTYLE using Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) to shorten transmission delays and dramatically improve its service. “We found that we could reduce latency dramatically with Amazon IVS, while building an IT environment from transmission to broadcast production with various Amazon Web Services [AWS] solutions,” says Koh.

CJ ENM uses Amazon IVS to create and configure live streaming and AWS Elemental MediaConvert to automatically encode a completed broadcast and add it to a video on demand (VOD) list for later use. The company stores these encoded videos in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), while AWS Lambda and Amazon EventBridge connect each of CJ ENM’s services.

CJ ENM is also leveraging Amazon Chime SDK to develop an effective live streaming chat service. “Our existing chat service restricted the number of physical servers we could use, so we had to limit the maximum number of concurrent users,” says Koh. “We decided to develop a chat service with Amazon Chime SDK to access flexible cloud infrastructure, rather than increase the number of physical servers whenever viewer numbers spike.” The company stores live streaming chat service messages in Amazon DynamoDB.

With AWS, CJ ENM reduced latency and cost while improving broadcast quality. It also gained the ability to develop and test new services quickly. The reduction in latency, from 30 to 3 seconds, allows its team to read and respond to customer chat messages in real time while broadcasting, improving the customer shopping experience. 

“We had a broadcast from a boutique in Milan, Italy, where the shopping host directly answered questions asked by viewers in Korea through real-time chat. With Amazon IVS, we achieved a low latency of 3 seconds, and the event was made possible by leveraging AWS Global Infrastructure.”

Full support from the AWS prototyping team proved very helpful given the set timelines for the service launch. The team completed front-end and back-end development in under two months. “The AWS prototyping team provided full support—from service planning to architecture review—to deliver a successful launch,” says Koh. “This was something no other cloud vendor could offer. Without AWS, it would’ve been extremely difficult to complete this project.” 

CJ ENM can now manage all tasks required for live streaming services from an AWS Management Console in just a few clicks. Additionally, broadcast management is simplified through automated recording and editing of videos. Now, developers can directly configure broadcast transmission functions by checking streaming indicators in the console—such as the average or maximum number of concurrent users over a certain period. Koh says, “In the future, we plan to further enhance CJ ONSTYLE with AWS and analyze various types of customer-related data.”

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