Welcome to Livepeer.com's first video tutorial. In the following video clips, you'll learn how to create an account on livepeer.com, create your first stream object, install and setup OBS, stream into Livepeer.com, and watch your Livepeer.com-transcoded video. We'll be following our 

. It is recommended you have that open as you go through the video clips below.

Step 1: Create an account on Livepeer.com


Step 2: Verify your Livepeer.com account


Step 5: Stream into Livepeer.com using OBS


Select RTMP ingest and playback URL pair on livepeer.com stream page:

Thanks for watching our streaming video tutorial! We'd love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to us at 

 with thoughts, suggestions, and any questions you might have.


The Livepeer streaming API is powered by a network with uniquely distributed architectural design. At the core of this network is a live ingest and transcoding engine that tries to maintain a robust live streaming workflow in the face of networking issues or hardware failures. This helps the Livepeer infrastructure scale in unique ways.

In a simple live streaming setup, a broadcaster sends a video stream into a media server. The media server receives the stream, transcodes it into different renditions, packages it up into the delivery format, and sends it to the CDN edge. The video player loads from the edge and plays the video on the user’s device.

This system works well for a small number of concurrent streams. But as we start to scale this system, we will quickly run into performance bottlenecks with the media server and transcoding system – 

 for a live stream to reach a wide audience. As an example, a medium VM on AWS can only transcode 2-3 concurrent streams in a standard bitrate ladder (1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p, 240p). A common solution to this problem is to operate many media server instances and load balance between them. However, this creates another problem – transcoding processes can fail in the middle of a stream if the resources are not carefully managed. The difficult problem of dynamically spinning up and down servers and load balancing long running streams between them make the system brittle. Each small error can cause multiple streams to fail at the same time. Each failure can make the live streams buffer, drop frames, or even completely cut out.

Instead of having each stream handled by a single server, Livepeer takes a distributed approach for ingest and transcoding. Ingest servers create video segments based on incoming keyframe intervals, and each segment is sent to a network of distributed transcoding clusters.

The ingest server keeps track of the latency and performance of each transcoding cluster, so that it can switch to different clusters in the middle of a stream when performance starts to degrade. Since the ingest servers only need to worry about video ingestion and segmentation, they can be strategically placed in high bandwidth environments with geographic diversity, which optimizes for network connection with broadcasters and CDNs. Each ingest server can handle many concurrent streams, because it no longer needs to take on the computation burden of transcoding.

The transcoding cluster has layers of redundancy and failover, so that failures can be quickly retried within the cluster. These transcoding clusters can operate in a variety of different environments – professional data centers, cryptocurrency mining farms, gaming computers to list a few. Most of the current transcoders are GPU based, which reduces transcoding latency by an order of magnitude. Because of the low cost in these environments comparing to public cloud providers, transcoding jobs can even be done multiple times in parallel to ensure high success rate and low latency in the live stream. The Livepeer transcoding software is currently tuned to run in a multi-GPU environment, load balancing across 2-8 GPUs on the same machine. Depending on the types of GPUs, some machines can transcode over 100 concurrent video streams. If internet congestion happens in a certain region, with a specific ISP, or DNS provider, other transcoder clusters will seamlessly pick up the work from the ones that are impacted by the outage. All of this can happen without central coordination, since the ingest servers and transcoders are all making independent routing decisions.

The distributed architecture also poses unique and interesting engineering challenges. For example, when each segment is processed independently, it's challenging for the system to have stream awareness and ensure consistent segment lengths, GOP sizes, and other video format specific configurations. The ingest server / transcoder communication should have proper back-pressure built in, so the performance degradation happens gracefully instead of abruptly. There should also be proper retry policy in place, so a DDoS attacker cannot bring down the whole infrastructure through amplified retries caused by transcoding errors. Livepeer is working on solutions that can address issues like this in both a controlled environment and a decentralized environment where a part of the infrastructure is operated by third-party operators.

Livepeer is a decentralized network, and the operation of the nodes that make up the network depends on independent node operators. In order to maintain baseline capacity to regions of the world with high demand, Livepeer operates a portion of the network. The deployment is on top of a heterogeneous environment, ranging from bare metal servers to Kubernetes namespaces. We use tools like Kubernetes, Ansible, and Consul to manage our deployment. This allows us to gain more control in resource management and automatically recover from hardware/software failures. 

Live streaming on the internet is a difficult task because users demand for 100% reliability, and the internet is not a very stable environment. Livepeer uses robust software with "cheap and fast" hardware to help us with the goal of achieving high reliability, while keeping the cost low. We are constantly improving our 

, and we would love to hear your feedback. If you are interested in learning more about Livepeer, please check out the 

. If you are interested in working on Livepeer, please take a look at the 

"senior video infrastructure engineer" position

"senior software engineer - public network" position.

Scaling the Livepeer Network

There is a large opportunity to disrupt more established e-commerce businesses in Europe and North America by being a fast follower of a rising trend in China - retail or e-commerce focused live streaming.

Retail focused live streaming blends entertainment and e-commerce to engage audiences in shopping-focused content, resulting in great conversion metrics and ultimately a significant increase in revenue.  Alibaba’s Taobao Marketplace, for example, pulled in around $15.1B USD in revenue from live streaming in 2018. With over 

60% of Chinese based internet users expected to be livestreamers

 before the end of 2020 , a trend that not surprisingly has been accelerated by the global COVID-19 pandemic, revenues for the livestream ecommerce market across China are 

Though numbers clearly show promise, the lack of traction this trend has seen outside of China is surprising. While there have been a few startups in western markets experimenting with blending live streaming and ecommerce, we have not seen established brands or retailers making serious attempts to replicate this trend outside of China.

At Livepeer.com, we see this as a great opportunity for disruptors in the industry to become early adopters of a new blend of entertainment, ecommerce, and live streaming. Underlying market enablers like high engagement in social media, online video, and influencer marketing for success in the West appear similar to those in China. Combined with good home internet and mobile connectivity, as well as ongoing challenges faced by retailers and shoppers due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems like an auspicious moment to challenge established practices of e-commerce brands and platforms in Western countries.

E-commerce live streaming would allow retailers to engage with shoppers live, bringing products into the home and allowing shoppers to participate in a new type of shopping experience that would fill the void left by global lockdowns. A traditional website with static images or prerecorded video just doesn’t deliver the same experience as does in-person or live streaming shopping. While Amazon and YouTube have some limited capabilities to help enable e-commerce focused live streaming, we at Livepeer.com believe the winners will be players that combine a highly capable ecommerce platform with an excellent live streaming service to deliver a cohesive brand-first experience for their shoppers.

One of the biggest challenges those looking to build a platform in this sector face is the cost of building out and running reliable live streaming video infrastructure. Individuals entering the sector will need to ensure a high-quality live video experience for content creators that will attract viewers excited about this new way of shopping.

Livepeer.com is thrilled about supporting growth and innovation in the e-commerce and retail live streaming space. We’ve created a video infrastructure service that uniquely addresses the costs associated with standing up and operating this type of infrastructure, whilst delivering a high quality transcoding and streaming service. If you’re looking to quickly build and are interested in learning more about how we can help, drop us a note at 

Video Tutorial : Stream into Livepeer for the First Time

Step 1: Create an account on Livepeer.com

Step 2: Verify your Livepeer.com account

Step 3: Create your first stream

Step 4: Install and setup OBS

Step 5: Stream into Livepeer.com using OBS

Step 6: Watch your transcoded video

Articles you may be interested in

Scaling the Livepeer Network

Live streaming and E-commerce, an Untapped Opportunity Outside of China

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