From company-wide Zoom meetings to international conferences going digital, virtual events are here to stay. In fact, Will Smith and Kevin Hart just backed Run The World, a (pandemic-proof) virtual events startup.
New! Stream now offers a Live Video Streaming API!
Live events turned livestream — from political rallies to virtual concerts — are often accompanied by a live chat component, allowing viewers to participate, comment and react in real-time.
Stream powers chat for live events around the world, providing a reliable and scalable messaging API, including dynamic reactions (GIFs, emojis and threads), AI-powered moderation, and more. As demand continues to increase amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Stream is investing in developing and innovating its livestream use-case. Today, Stream announces several new livestream features:
- Block lists: To moderate live chats and help protect their brand, customers now have the ability to turn on a list of 10,000 commonly blacklisted words, or create their own and upload them. Applications can have up to 15 block lists.
- Slow mode: A channel feature that reduces message noise by allowing channel moderators to limit the frequency of messages. When enabled, users can’t post more than one message per cooldown interval, which can be anywhere from one second to five minutes. Whatever the preference, slow mode on livestream chats can result in cleaner, digestible chats, and creates a better experience.
- Feature Throttling: When a channel has more than 100 active watchers, Stream automatically toggles off some features. This is to avoid performance degradation for end-users. Processing large amounts of events can potentially increase CPU and memory usage on mobile and web apps.
- Virtualized message lists: A new React component designed for handling high traffic live events — and a major performance improvement from the regular channel list component — virtualized message lists show only a fraction of the messages in the viewfinder and help keep the stream fresh and fast while rendering thousands of inputs. Fewer DOM (document object model) nodes will keep streams moving, particularly on slower computers and internet connections.
Implementing chat for live events will only become more important as we go on, and API-focused startups such as Stream will continue to power these digital experiences. While the pandemic certainly expedited the rise of digital events and conferences, “these things should have been online a long time ago,” according to our co-founder and CEO Thierry Schellenbach. “Many of these live event use cases will not disappear.”
