Millicast: the technology to build a new generation of interactive live streaming applications

Millicast researched, pushed boundaries, contributed to standards committees and to the community. They took risks and looked to the future.

Last year Dr. Alex passed away in a tragic car accident. Nevertheless, Dr. Alex’s vision endures through WebRTC, through Millicast, and through a product roadmap that will continue to redefine how we consume video and audio over the Internet for many years to come.

Raskenlund: What is Millicast?

Ryan Jespersen: Millicast is a WebRTC streaming platform and CDN originally built to replace Flash RTMP workflows for one-to-many streaming with sub-second latency across the globe. This functionality, in addition to our recently added interactivity features, gives users the ability to use our simple API to develop a new generation of interactive live streaming applications that are truly web-native.

What contribution is required on the partner’s side? The partner needs a little bit of web-based development on the ingest side, and a little bit of web-based development on the player side and finally, they should bring along their cameras of course!

Raskenlund: What are the best use-cases for your solution?

Ryan Jespersen: Our customers include top Hollywood Studios, Broadcasters and Post-Production Houses that enable live Remote Production & Post-Production workflows through WebRTC. 

There are also many emerging markets for 2-way interactive “Clubhouse-like” applications, eSports, VR & AR; as well as more traditional ultra-low latency use cases for Live Auctions, iGaming, Betting & Gambling.

Raskenlund: Where do you clearly outperform your competitors?

Ryan Jespersen: Millicast is the only standards-based WebRTC streaming platform offering less than 500ms of latency at mass scale over the public internet. It is also the first platform to offer true end-to-end encryption, as well as real-time AV1 encoding with Scalable Video Coding (SVC), which enables customers to maximize quality, optimize bandwidth, and support for features like HDR, 10-bit, 4:4:4 colour and premium Surround Sound.

Raskenlund: How is Millicast different from other streaming platforms?

Ryan Jespersen: Unlike our competitors, our scientists and engineers are active members of WebRTC working groups at IETF and W3C, which enables us to help define the next generation of WebRTC features that push the boundaries of scale, quality, reliability and security within our own Millicast product.

Raskenlund: How does Millicast perform?

Ryan Jespersen: For our remote production customers, Millicast performance is measured in terms of quality and latency. Top broadcasters like NBC Universal, CBS Viacom and ESPN use Millicast because it delivers broadcast quality features (4K, HDR, Surround Sound) while still enabling real-time interaction with 200-500ms of latency.

For our live auction and iGaming customers, Millicast performance is measured in terms of scale and reliability, with the need to scale their streams to hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers while ensuring 24/7 uptime.

Millicast is a market leader in quality, latency, scale, and reliability.

Raskenlund: How well does Millicast scale? How does it perform on longer ranges?

Ryan Jespersen: Unlike other WebRTC solutions which are designed for small audiences and point-to-point adaptation, Millicast’s global infrastructure can provide scalability to the largest number of concurrent viewers in the industry.

Our customers are evenly distributed between Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Americas, and we are able to retain the quality of service while still retaining extremely high quality and ultra-low latency.

Raskenlund: What are the costs associated with having your solution in production? How does the cost increase with consecutive streams?

Ryan Jespersen: Millicast is built for developers, and our simple API and SDKs make it easy to launch your own interactive streaming solution in a matter of hours or days, instead of months or years. This enables our customers to reduce their CapEx, as well as scale their OpEx intuitively by offering a simple monthly billing model based on bandwidth usage that rewards customers with additional volume-based discounts as their business grows.

Would you be interested in knowing how we could help you use Millicast in your streaming infrastructure? Feel free to drop us an email.