Keep in Mind Before Creating a Video Streaming App

It goes without saying that the time for televisions as a mainstay source for entertainment now faces an existential crisis with the advent of cutting-edge technologies like video streaming apps. These technologies have made the video-viewing experience totally seamless while giving consumers absolute power to control media content they want to watch. Point is people are no longer under the mercy of television/cable operators to force-watch arbitrary programs or have limited access to certain media sources to watch.

Video streaming apps and their increasing popularity among people from around the world leave us to no doubt in saying that watching media content on television is on the brink of extinction, as the sophisticated technology of video streaming apps are replacing them faster. Besides being the key source for a plethora of entertainment values, these video streaming apps are also considered the highest revenue-generating mediums for big players of the app industry, who are venturing into the field of video streaming apps for their effective and persuasive business promotion.

Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Hotstar are some of the most popular video streaming apps. They not only provide effective entertainment values to the consumers worldwide, but prove to be a treasure trove for their creators and investors to earn in millions out of subscriptions, ads and other sources monetized through their apps.

Because of the commercial success of industries spearheaded by video streaming apps, the demand to create a trending video streaming app is an evil necessity for businesses to maximize the vastness of digital marketing landscape dominated under the inescapable craze of video entertainment provided through streaming apps.

However, creating a video streaming app requires a certain level of understanding about its features, technical requirements, and other key things. Jotted down below are some important considerations for any business to create a video streaming app for its commercial and business engagement values.

Technologies Used for Creating a Video Streaming App

• Expertise on programming languages, such as Java, Swift, and PHP.
• Knowledge of some popular frameworks: Gradle, Codeigniter, Retrofit, Push notifications, Cocoa Touch, 3D Touch, and In-app purchase.
• Familiarity with Core Data, MySQL, and Realm Database.
• Knowledge of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Transcoder, and Amazon CloudFront.

Now the purpose of any creative video streaming app should be to make it more engaging, productive, friendly, and very much a user-intuitive product. These are the features that you must add to your streaming app to make it more seamless for your users.

Features a Video Streaming App Must Have

• Allow users to register their personal account on your video streaming app through multiple registration options, such as Facebook, Google, and others.
• Don’t leave users confused with profile creation. Make them do this easily, like editing profile, managing saved videos, watch-history and managing their subscribed channels under profile option. This also helps you recommend best content to your users based on their profile database, such as type of videos watched.
• Most video streaming apps have ‘disabled’ feature of video sharing thus causing their users a big frustration about how to share favorite videos with their friends and relatives. Allow video-sharing option in your streaming app which will prove a great catalyst for helping you to earn loyal user base, eventually.
• Allow the feature of adaptive video streaming, a much-needed virtue for your streaming app to allow users stream videos of whatsoever definition consistent with the given network bandwidth. Means to say, let users decide on which network bandwidth they want a video of specific quality streamed.
• Integrate your streaming app with subscribe feature, something very important to make the viewing experience of users comfortable and simplified.
• The facility of offline watching of a downloaded video by users should be another key feature in your video streaming app.
• Include ‘Search’ option for allowing users to find out the video in sync with their preference on your app. This option can facilitate seamless navigation for users to find the video they like to watch faster.
• Allow users to enlist their favorite videos to watch them later in their spare times.
• Serve personalized notifications to users about latest videos, new/modified app policies, payment reminders, and other relevant updates.
• The feature of Ratings and Reviews for allowing users to voice their individual experience with an app for other people to determine the credence of the app.

Things to Consider When Making a Video Streaming App

User Prioritization: Prioritize your end-users, like whether you are developing a video streaming app for user to user (Viber/Skype), or user to audience (Facebook/YouTube etc.)

Encoding/Decoding Digital Data Stream:Compressing digital data stream to reduce disk space both on server and user sides is a must. Therefore, compression/decompression algorithm, an inbuilt supporter on any device, is taken into practice to create standard video compression format for seamless streaming of the compressed videos. Make sure that the codecs are consistent with how different devices decode and stream video feeds to the user in a right format.

For instance, iOS-based live-streaming apps use H.264 and MPEG 4 codecs, while Android-based video streaming apps use H.264 and VP8 media codec.

Video Quality On Specific Network Bandwidth:Video contents to be played via video streaming app depend on a specific internet bandwidth requirement to avoid latencies. Take this consideration as a key factor while developing a video streaming app. A particular video property not consistent with the existing network bandwidth in a country would create problem for users in terms of over-buffering or not playing at all. Video codec and compression efficiency also matter in this regard.

Consider Simultaneous Connections Your Server Can Bear: It is very important to consider if your video streaming server can bear the load of simultaneous connections. This is essential in light of not making streaming performance a bad experience for users.

Factors affecting streaming performance could be bandwidth of server/user side, disk space restriction, video/audio processing or time taken to process downgrading quality of the video.

The idea is to create a video streaming app that is limitless on streaming performance parameter, thus providing seamless viewing experience without crashing to the users.

Other Features to Consider

• For users to save and rewatch their favorite videos, enable your app with Cloud Recording Option.
• To serve video content to the users from specific demography, use Geo-Blocking system/feature.
• To keep an eye on user’s log-in activities, like favorite watchlist, clicks on ads etc. Analytics feature could be handy for your video streaming app.

Additional Read:The Essential Ingredients to Create a Successful Animated Video

Wrapping it up

The use of video streaming app is not limited to entertaining users with brand-new video content that they can watch anytime, but it is also considered a fantastic medium for businesses to effectively and persuasively market their products and services to target customers. Therefore, if you develop a video streaming app considering a perfect niche and monetization tactics, pay heed to the key facts mentioned above. There is no doubt you will gain competitive advantage in due course of time. And if you imagine developing a video streaming app next to “Instagram” that would be even better for the lucrative growth of your business. This is the reason why companies worldwide are prioritizing to hire a skilled video streaming app development company to transcend their business scale to its ever-imaginable success.