Best Video Live Streaming Solutions for Building Custom Websites and Apps

The world is increasingly mobile. In a matter of fact, an incredible 85.95% of the world’s population now owns a smartphone. That’s a lot of people with potential access to people share ideas and businesses and any online store.

With their customers and this level of global access, businesses in the online video space need the right tools to stand out. They need a great website builder, app creation through an app maker and video. Furthermore, with over half of video content now viewed on mobile, businesses need dynamic high-quality video solutions to remain competitive and sell online more.

In this article, we’ll look at two key tools to build and customize web applications and mobile apps. We’ll delve into two key tools to start building custom mobile apps: video APIs and SDKs. Then we’ll go into  embedding streaming video,  white-label streaming and  customizable templates for branding. Using these, you can build a modern, reputable and influential customized video presence.

Key developer tools to build custom mobile apps

First, let’s look at mobile apps. The question is, how can you take the abilities of online video (live streaming and beyond) and integrate them into your customized own app? The answer is to use an that has the APIs and SDKs you need. Let’s look at each in turn.

Video APIs

Before we can fully explain this process, we need to understand the term API and what it means. API stands for “Application Programming Interface. Essentially, an API allows a programmer to easily write code that interacts with a given application or service (in this case, with streaming solutions).

We can also explain this using a simile: an API is like a simplified “language” that allows you to create apps that interact with clients and control an underlying service. You can use this language to quickly and easily code custom apps, hrough both a paid mobile app and free app builder.

Since 2012, the number of public APIs available to developers has more than tripled. The rate of growth in private and subscriber APIs is similarly exponential in recent years too. That’s because APIs are powerful tools that allow you to create custom solutions and integrations that would otherwise be impossible. A video API is an essential tool for any video streaming platform

Mobile SDKs

More than 58 percent of video plays globally were on mobile devices in late 2017. That figure is forecast to now be well over 60 percent. Therefore, building apps powerful websites optimized for mobile devices is critical.

SDKs make this process a lot easier. The term SDK stands for “Software Developer’s Kit.” An SDK includes actual code samples and tools to make app development using APIs much easier. These tools typically include a visual screen, code app builder itself, a compiler, and linker, and more.

As one example, we can look at the video SDKs offered by Dacast on free website. These include both an Android and iOS SDK. These tools make it much easier to get up and running with mobile apps. We can see this in the stats. The number of viewers watching Dacast live streams and on-demand video via mobile devices increased from 9% in 2016 to 39% in 2017. This amounts roughly to a five-fold increase!

Key features to build live video websites

Next, let’s take a look at some of the key features of building your own live video websites.

Embed streams anywhere

The industry publication MarketingWeek says that live streaming “is key to building authenticity on social channels.” Authenticity is all about branding and voice, and this underscores the importance of embedding your live streams on your websites.

Embedding your live streams is THE key step in building a website around your broadcasts. Typically this involves copying an “embed code” and pasting it into the “code view” of your website. This code can be modified to adjust the size of your video and other attributes.

White label solution

The second key factor in building a custom live streaming website is to use a white label solution. “White label” refers to a platform that doesn’t include any branding from the service provider. I’m sure you’ve all seen YouTube videos and noticed how each video player includes the YouTube logo. When you click that logo, it sends you to the YouTube site.

This technology can direct viewers to external sites and cause you to bleed users. Instead, you need to create a website video player that focuses exclusively on your content and provides a professional experience.

The best video live streaming solutions all include a white label option. However, some platforms charge exorbitant prices for this feature—more than $1,000 per month! Dacast offers white label live streaming at all plan levels, starting at $39/month.

Customizable branding

Finally, we recommend customizable branding for all professional broadcasters. The best live streaming platforms should include a customizable branding option. This should include the ability to:

These types of customizations allow you to change the look-and-feel of the player to fit right in with your website template. This eases the process of building a professional live video website template considerably. It’s no surprise, with features like this, that 51.9% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI.

Best video live streaming solutions

We can take the above list of key features and use them to compare the best video live streaming solutions. We don’t have space for a full comparison here, but here’s a quick and dirty one. If you need a more in-depth comparison, check out this video streaming solutions comparison.

1. Brightcove ⭐⭐⭐⭐

• Video API: available with plans starting at $599/month
• Mobile SDKs: all plans, starting at $599/month
• Embedding: all plans, starting at $599/month
• White label: all plans, starting at $599/month
• Customizable branding: all plans, starting at $599/month

2. Dacast ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

• Video API: available with plans starting at $39/month
• Mobile SDKs: all plans
• Embedding: all plans
• White label: all plans
• Customizable branding

3. IBM Cloud Video ⭐⭐

• Video API: available with plans starting at $999/month and up
• Mobile SDKs: custom plans costing more than $999/month
• Embedding: all plans
• White label: limited starting at $499/month
• Customizable branding: $999/month

4. Livestream ⭐⭐⭐

• Video API: available with custom plans starting at $999/month and up
• Mobile SDKs: not available
• Embedding: all plans, starts at $75/month
• White label: $999/month and up
• Customizable branding: $999/month and up

5. Ooyala ⭐⭐⭐

• Video API: available on all plans, custom pricing
• Mobile SDKs: available on all plans, custom pricing
• Embedding: available on all plans, custom pricing
• White label: available on all plans, custom pricing
• Customizable branding: available on all plans, custom pricing

6. Vimeo Live ⭐⭐⭐

• Video API: only available on custom plans
• Mobile SDKs: limited availability on all plans
• Embedding: all plans, start at $75/month
• White label: all plans, starts at $75/month
• Customizable branding: all plans, start at $75/month

Professional services to get up and running fast

As you can see, Dacast offers the most compelling price-to-performance ratio among the different solutions for live streaming. That’s why we think Dacast is at the top of any list of the best live video streaming solutions.

What if you need to get custom live-streaming websites and mobile apps up and running, but you don’t have a developer team to help you out? That’s where Dacast’s professional services team comes in. We offer a team of experts to help you get started. They can help you build your mobile app, launch a custom website, manage it and even more—and they can do it fast.

Final Thoughts

Using the information contained in this article, you’ll be better armed to create and monetize a website and build custom mobile app for your live video broadcasts. Using the best website templates and customizing them along with your mobile apps, you can have massive influence. And the best live streaming solutions offer the right tools that make this easier.

Dacast is full of incredible features and resources that can help. Along with professional-grade video solutions, and customizable templates, there’s also a dedicated team of experts. With Dacast’s powerful features, small businesses and companies alike have infinite possibilities.

You can try Dacast and all its features free for 14-days today. Sign-up is quick, seamless and without any commitment.

Try free today

Any questions, comments, or ideas? Let us know in the comment section below. We appreciate hearing from our readers, and we will get back to you. For regular tips on live streaming and exclusive offers, you can also join our LinkedIn group.

Thanks for reading, and as always, best of luck with your live broadcasts!