Streaming App Development Services

Audio streaming services are comprised of cloud services that offer customized audio streams and the end-user audio streaming apps that are used to consume those streams. Most of us are familiar with audio streaming apps such as Spotify or Apple Music and the features they provide for playback control, account management and listening preferences. Given the competition for audio streaming app development, it is important to provide a seamless and intuitive UX. For most streaming services it will be necessary to develop apps for smartphones (iOS and Android) and apps for laptop/desktop environments too. With the popularity of smart speakers, it is advisable to include those platforms in your roadmap as well.

While developing robust audio streaming apps that are intuitive and thoroughly tested on all target platforms presents challenges, the more complex aspect of audio streaming architecture is the supporting cloud service that manages user accounts and preferences to provide customized streams. Beyond user account management, the cloud is responsible for managing all the content. As content is not static, it is necessary to automate processes that ingest, catalog and store new content whether that be new musical releases, new podcasts, or new radio shows. Not just the content stream is unique to the listener, so are the ads. Again, the cloud system needs to be able to insert the right regional or targeted ads into each stream based on the user’s profile and preferences. Customizing content may involve a variety of tools such as AI to optimize each stream based on a user’s history and preferences. Finally, in the development of any cloud system, there are considerations for scaling. For example, when the Yonder Music system was launched it was rolled out to 15 million users in the first two weeks without knowing how many users would adopt the service. The system needed to be designed so it could auto scale to support hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users, yet not consume more cloud server capacity than was necessary at any given time to minimize costs.

Similar to audio streaming service development, video streaming service development for entertainment includes the design of a cloud application and video streaming app development. There are often a variety of apps to support video streaming devices such as Roku, FireTV, Android/iOS smartphone and internet browsers. As video streams are large, it is necessary to encode the video to optimize compression and may even involve adaptive bitrate solutions which scale to the available bandwidth to deliver the right resolution on each device. We have worked on every aspect of video streaming systems including cloud and mobile. Contact us to discuss your needs.

With the proliferation of cameras in the last decade, the variety of video streaming architectures has grown beyond the streaming entertainment solution described above to address other applications such as using cameras for enterprise security, home security, agriculture, warehouses, food prep, and more. For example, imagine a customer that has several cameras in thousands of convenience stores that they want to monitor for specific activities. This type of system is likely to use cloud-based and edge-based AI to perform the first level review of the camera data. Depending on the complexity of the behavior being monitored, the AI may escalate to human review. This scenario reverses the classic entertainment example of one data source with many viewers to be many sources (cameras) with a few viewers and requires a significantly different video streaming architecture. In another scenario, imagine the average smart home with a couple of cameras that are only occasionally watched by a single viewer. This situation is closer to one source to one viewer and would utilize a different video streaming architecture to optimize performance and minimize operational costs. Each of these solutions requires a different video streaming architecture and we have worked on them all.

For additional information on our video experience, check out our digital video product design page that focuses on the devices and technologies for individual video streams as opposed to the management and distribution of a large number of streams as described on this page.

Cardinal Peak has decades of experience working in the cable, video and radio industries and we are committed to delivering the best possible solutions for our customers. We have created multiple custom streaming solutions for the audio and video markets. We have also developed non-entertainment based video streaming systems for other markets including both enterprise and residential security.

Check out our streaming case studies, including an Amazon Kinesis Video Streams and edge machine learning smart cat detector for real-time remote monitoring.