Lights, Camera, Live Stream

The Challenge

The client is a family-owned Australian production and live streaming company. Their team of producers and event managers provides end-to-end livestream production services to thousands of viewers worldwide, serving enterprise customers across technology, education, event activation, consulting, and government sectors.

The company had relied on WordPress to build custom branded pages for each livestream event. A producer would manually create each page, configure the branding, embed the stream, and publish it before the event went live. As the business grew, this manual process became a bottleneck. Each event required hands-on work from the production team, limiting how many events could run concurrently and creating risk when last-minute changes were needed close to go-live.

The company approached Kablamo to develop a customer-facing platform that would allow their enterprise customers to log in, create their own event pages, and customise their livestream feeds directly. The platform needed to be fast, scalable to handle concurrent events with large audiences, and integrated with live streaming services. Most importantly, it needed to give customers complete autonomy over their event page branding, removing the dependency on the production team for every page change.

The Approach

The engagement started with a discovery phase where the team ran customer journey workshops, feature prioritisation sessions, and lean service blueprint workshops with the client's team and end users. These sessions clarified what customers actually needed from a self-service tool versus what the production team had been doing manually on their behalf.

A key technical decision early in the project was to integrate Vimeo's live stream API rather than building a custom video player from scratch with AWS MediaLive. This decision significantly reduced development time and provided features out of the box including RTMP stream keys and embedded chat, freeing the team to focus engineering effort on the custom event page builder, which was the core differentiator for the product.

The event page builder allowed customers to upload media including images, text, videos, and livestream links, then configure pages to reflect their own branding. Reusable content blocks gave users complete control over placement and layout. Material UI provided base components, allowing the team to concentrate on UX and custom interactions rather than rebuilding standard UI elements.

The architecture was a single-page application hosted on CloudFront and S3, with a CRUDL API using API Gateway and Lambda, backed by DynamoDB. The front end used React, TypeScript, Storybook, and Material UI with Jest for unit testing. The back end used Go with AWS Lambda and DynamoDB, with AWS Cognito handling authentication and access control. CloudFormation templates automated infrastructure provisioning, and fully automated deployments to the development environment ensured the team could ship changes quickly and safely. Separate development and production environments were established from the start.

The entire solution was built on AWS with no external dependencies beyond the Vimeo streaming integration. This kept the operational footprint small and predictable, with costs scaling proportionally to actual event traffic rather than requiring fixed infrastructure.

The Results

The MVP was delivered in just over two months, on time and on budget. Enterprise customers can now configure their own event pages through the self-service platform, a process that previously required the production team to build each page manually in WordPress. The time from event booking to page-ready dropped from hours of manual work to minutes of customer self-service.

The serverless AWS architecture ensures the platform scales with demand. When a large enterprise event draws thousands of concurrent viewers, the Lambda and DynamoDB backend handles the load without pre-provisioning. When traffic drops after the event, costs return to baseline. This elastic model is a natural fit for the event business, where traffic is inherently spiky and unpredictable.

The team also completed a four-stage roadmap for future feature development, giving the client a clear path for extending the platform beyond the initial MVP. Features like advanced analytics, multi-stream support, and enhanced audience interaction tools were scoped and prioritised for subsequent releases. The automated deployment pipeline and separate environments mean new features can be tested safely before reaching production.

Looking Forward

The platform provides the company's enterprise customers with more engagement and customisation options than they have ever had. The workflow is more efficient for both the production team and their customers, with the production team freed from repetitive page-building work to focus on the creative and technical aspects of live event production.

Development and production environments are set up for safe future feature testing, and the serverless architecture means the platform can absorb growth without infrastructure changes. The CloudFormation templates that automate infrastructure provisioning mean the client's team can deploy updates with confidence, following the same automated process Kablamo established during the build.

Kablamo continues to provide ongoing operational and development support through Product Care services, helping the client extend the platform as their customer base and event volume grow.