Events startup StageConnect puts virtual audience front and center with bespoke live streaming platform

Picture this... You're events startup StageConnect, you're changing the face of virtual and hybrid events by turning live stream viewers into active participants

Your audience can be seen and heard on the big screen, interact with the band, conference host or company head, and connect with other members of the audience. But you've been relying on third-party software to host your interactive events service, using existing video conferencing software and merging multiple sessions together to seat the larger audience using equipment at the venue - you require a more elegant solution to effectively deliver at scale.
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So you turn to SOUTHWORKS.

Over the course of 10 weeks, SOUTHWORKS helped define and design a bespoke cloud platform for managing events and participants that can be plugged into a front-end component for displaying dynamic audience layouts to hosts and viewers alike, giving StageConnect full control over its interactive events, and allowing the company to easily deliver at scale.

The expertise and pace of the SOUTHWORKS team helped StageConnect quickly design and deploy a serverless architecture that is fit for the new world of virtual and hybrid interactive events. Everything was built in Node.js running on top of AWSLambda functions to create a serverless solution for managing events, and storing all the information on Amazon Aurora and AmazonDynamoDB. What's more, producers and viewers can reach the solution using a REST Amazon API Gateway to update the events through HTTP and a Web Socket Amazon API Gateway to deliver real-time notifications. SOUTHWORKS integrated all these services using Amazon SNS as an event bus.

And to meet the demands of interactive live streaming to large audiences, StageConnect relied on a Red5 Pro cluster to handle reliable, high-quality and real-time video at scale. The final puzzle piece was developing an interface between the Red5 Pro cluster andStageConnect’s front-end component, allowing the company to design different compositions of the audience feed, whether that’s for a video wall or other big screen at an event, or a participant’s laptop at home.

For a startup like StageConnect, a static end product wasn’t going to cut it. SOUTHWORKS provided a platform built on flexible, scalable technology — designed with the future in mind. Now, StageConnect can continue developing new features, interfaces and services, and quickly experiment in a real-world environment to provide the very best event experience for its customers.

‍That’s what happens when you Make Everything Right™.