BookMyGIG

Shows are getting cancelled all over the world due to pandemic, but with bookmygig, shows can be live streamed.

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Inspiration

I see that shows/events were called off, as soon as the pandemic broke out. This has impacted the creators severely and I wanted to build something which helps content creators perform live shows online for live audiences.

What it does

This is a platform where creators perform live online shows(could be dance, comedy, plays, and the list goes on...) for live audiences. There is also a chat feature, where the users who are part of the same show can chat in realtime while they are watching it.

How I built it

Framework/Technologies used :

  • ReactJS
  • NodeJS
  • Redis as an in-memory database
  • Node-media-server (RTMP) for video streaming
  • Socket.io for realtime-chat

Three main Pillars of the application :

  • REDIS is used to store data, as it is an in-memory database which makes our app incredibly fast and the process of exchanging data back and forth is seamless. Our application uses different blend of built-in data structures to store and retreive data in an efficient manner.

  • RTMP provides a bidirectional message multiplex service over a reliable stream transport, such as TCP, intended to carry parallel streams of video, audio, and data messages, with associated timing information, between a pair of communicating peers. More about RTMP could be learned here.

    • When a creator lists a gig, he/she is given a unique streaming ID which is used to identify the creator on the backend and allocate a separate channel, where he could live stream and also the audiences of that particular show are isolated from the rest of the channels/shows.
    • As soon as the creator hits start stream button, the video data is transported to media server, where it encoded to different formats. In our case, we use flv format which is a file format used by Adobe Flash Player to store and deliver synchronized audio and video streams over the Internet.
    • Later, on the client side we use a flvjs plugin to render the video in realtime.

  • REALTIME CHAT is accomplished using socket.io, which is a library to abstract the WebSocket connections. It enables realtime, bi-directional communication between web clients and servers.

    • When a client types the message and clicks send, it is sent to server and is then broadcasted to all the connected clients in the same room.
    • The messages that gets exchanged within a room is isolated from the outside world.

Also, we are using Redis pubsub indirectly as socket.io internally relies on it to achieve the realtime two-way communication.

Challenges I ran into

  • Handling creator data in the backend and storing it efficiently using built-in Redis data structures.
  • Fetching all the shows asynchronously(using promises), and resolving them was tricky.
  • Figuring out a way to load & play the live stream on the browser without clashing between others was really challenging.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I could successfully able to hook-up all the different parts of the application together and come up with the working end product.

What I learned

I picked up a lot in this process, this was the first time having my hands-on Redis, Socket.io and came across terms like RTMP, its uses, and also how to set one up.

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