It's amazing to see large apps like Nextdoor, Strava, Match Group, and Patreon, as well as established brands like IBM and Adobe, rely on Stream to power their apps. Over one billion end users rely on Stream. Some of the largest apps have 100M to 250M users. We're currently growing our team faster than ever to keep up with demand (especially staff-level Go engineers).
This year, I'm particularly excited to see our customers build AI voice agents and AI-powered chat experiences.
Another theme is that we're seeing more customers leverage the full suite of products to build engagement, starting with the feeds and proceeding to chat and video for more one-on-one interaction.
Moderation is also becoming a bigger part of this since the Digital Services Act requires excellent moderation capabilities and reporting for larger companies.
The roadmap we've outlined for the year ahead is not set in stone, we want to hear from you.
Do you have a feature request or want to help shape what's next? Email product@getstream.io or tag me on X.
We want to empower developers to build amazing apps by providing world-class building blocks for chat, video calling, activity feeds, and moderation. Let's dive deeper into our plans for each product this year.
Video: AI-Powered Smarter Scalability
The Video API lets you quickly build high-quality video calling and livestreaming experiences. With the product's rapid growth and adoption, we're scaling up the team and accelerating development.
AI Integrations
Our OpenAI integration for building voice agents is now live. In the coming months, we'll also launch a Python real-time SDK, allowing developers to seamlessly integrate AI into video calling and livestreaming experiences. Additionally, we're introducing a SIP integration, expanding interoperability with telephony systems.
Livestreaming
Stream already supports ultra-low latency livestreaming with AV1 encoding for up to 100k participants. To further enhance livestreaming capabilities, we're adding:
- Dual encoding to make AV1 more widely applicable
- WHIP (WebRTC-HTTP ingestion protocol) for better streaming interoperability
- SRT ingress
- Non-composite recording and client-side recording for greater flexibility
Next, we're enhancing documentation and building a demo on setting up low-latency livestreaming at higher resolutions (up to 4K) and 60fps, ideal for gaming, sports, and other high-motion content.
Video Calling
We're improving waiting room and breakout room support to enhance meeting and event experiences.
Follow the roadmap on GitHub: https://github.com/GetStream/protocol/discussions/127
Activity Feeds: More Control, More Visibility
Activity Feeds is Stream's original product. Due to its excellent scalability, it's used by some of the world's largest companies. However, the API is a little dated compared to our video and chat APIs. So, 2025 is the time for a major revamp. Here's what we have in store for the new iteration of feeds.
"For You" Feeds
We're going to add support for "for you" personalized feeds. These will ship out of the box with standard algorithms to help improve engagement in your apps. Setting up followers in an app is quite a bit of work. Typically, your most active users do this, but the vast majority of users don't. This is why most social apps rely primarily on the "for you" feed.Â
Modern Feeds API
We'll bring the real-time system, client-side SDKs, permissions, push, CDN support, and all other modern API essentials you're used to for Feeds. The new API will feel similar to our Video and Chat APIs.Â
Campaign API
Like the Chat Campaign API, we will enable you to send large campaigns to your user base.Â
New Features for FeedsÂ
Other new Activity Feeds API features include:
- Feed members, so you can control who can post to a feed
- Geolocation based feeds
- Activity visibility/with different levels for different tiers of members/ ollowers
- Query activity endpoint
- Activity search
- Activity filtering
- Activity expiration
- Bookmarking
- Follow approval flow
- Control over comment sorting & nested comments
- GDPR endpoints
- Audit logs
Engagement Stats
We're revamping engagement stats to provide out-of-the-box analytics for deeper insights into how users interact with your app. While many enterprise customers pipe data into their warehouses, having built-in, real-time metrics makes it easier to track trends at a glance.
For Feeds, our new stats tools will help apps:
- Monitor community activity, including active users, post volume, and engagement trends.
- Analyze sentiment and trending topics to better understand user interactions.
- Surface top-performing content based on reactions, comments, and likes.
- Track retention and churn, providing visibility into user growth.
- Generate exportable reports on a weekly or monthly basis for team-wide insights.
These improvements will help businesses fine-tune engagement strategies, optimize content, and foster healthier communities.
Finally, we're laying the groundwork for Feeds v3, a major product evolution. While we're not ready to share full details, expect new front-end SDKs and improvements in scalability, customization, and developer efficiency.
Think of it as the next generation of Feeds—built for developers who need even more power and control. Stay tuned for more updates later this year.
Chat: Smoother and More Engaging Conversations
Leading apps like Nextdoor, Patreon, and Strava rely on Stream for in-app messaging, and we're continuing to expand privacy, engagement, and real-time communication capabilities in 2025.
Private Messaging
Our new private messaging feature lets developers securely specify which users can see a message, keeping conversations contextual and controlled within shared channels.
This feature is ideal for:
- Rideshare apps: Send updates like "Your driver is here" or "Your passenger has arrived" privately.
- Marketplaces: Alert buyers and sellers if a transaction seems suspicious, helping prevent scams.
- Collaborative Workspaces: Share private instructions or updates without disrupting team-wide conversations.
Smarter Messaging Tools
We're also introducing:
- Message Drafts: Save unfinished messages and return to them later.
- Reminders & Bookmarks: Temporarily dismiss messages and set reminders to revisit them.
- Live Location Sharing: Share real-time locations within chat, perfect for logistics, events, and coordination.
These updates make Stream Chat more secure, intuitive, and adaptable to real-world use cases.
Search and Team Controls
But that's not all. We're also making key improvements behind the scenes:
- Campaigns are getting additional stats to show how many users received and opened them
- Team-level permissions will provide more granular access control, allowing organizations to fine-tune who can do what.
- Batch Channel Operations will make it possible to manage multiple chat channels at once, saving time and effort.
- And finally, we're rolling out a Search Revamp that makes it easier than ever to find the right conversations. Whether users are looking for a past discussion, a specific keyword, or a message from a particular sender, in-app search is about to get faster, smarter, and more powerful.
Push Notifications
Our latest Push Notifications V4 upgrade delivers faster, more customizable, and scalable notifications to keep users engaged:
- 10M+ messages per minute for real-time reliability at scale.
- Smarter grouping at the channel or call level to reduce noise.
- Enhanced templates for APN, Firebase, Huawei, and Xiaomi.
- Granular push preferences at both channel and user levels.
- Snooze notifications, multi-user support on shared devices, and push for reactions, threads, and edits.
With these improvements, notifications are more efficient, context-aware, and adaptable to any app environment.
From private messaging to AI-powered features and better user controls, 2025 is shaping up to be a major year for Chat API improvements—and we can't wait to see how developers use them to power even more engaging in-app conversations.
Moderation: More Automation, AI, & Control
Moderation is essential across all three of our products. New compliance bodies like DSA and DPF are emerging, requiring additional layers of security above and beyond current standards like GDPR.
Our AI Moderation suite is purpose built to help provide the most safe and compliant collaboration in the market. Our Moderation API can also be used beyond Stream, allowing you to moderate usernames, job postings, descriptions, and other types of content.
AI-Powered Moderation
LLMs are rapidly becoming more capable and cost-effective. The best results come from combining AI with traditional classification models. Currently, our LLM-powered moderation features are available to a select group of customers, and the results are highly promising. With LLMs, you can:
- Reduce false positives and false negatives.
- Automate moderation actions.
- Define additional checks in plain English, allowing AI to interpret nuanced guidelines.
This approach is incredibly powerful and represents the future of moderation.
Design Excellence
As we expand our moderation team, we are refining every aspect of the moderation interface. Since moderators rely on this tool for hours each day, the UX must be seamless, efficient, and intuitive.
Expanding Moderation to Images and Video
We're extending moderation beyond text with OCR-based moderation, allowing moderators to detect harmful or inappropriate text within images. This prevents bad actors from bypassing traditional text filters.
On the video side, we're rolling out moderation for video files with live video calls and large-scale live-streaming events planned soon, ensuring safety across all forms of multimedia content.
With AI-driven detection, expanded media coverage, and powerful rule-based automation, Stream's Moderation API is set to become faster, smarter, and more adaptive to real-world challenges.
What's Next?
Thank you to all our customers who trust Stream to power their apps.
As we continue rolling out these improvements, we'll listen, iterate, and refine based on what our customers need. Our goal isn't just to keep up with industry trends—it's to help developers push the boundaries of what's possible in real-time communication.
To make that vision a reality, we're growing our team faster than ever, bringing on top talent to expand our capabilities and accelerate innovation.
Have a feature request? Want to help shape what's next? Get in touch at product@getstream.io—we're building this future together.
And if you're passionate about creating the next generation of in-app communication, we're hiring!