How Playback built a global stadium for watching sports together

Playback is revolutionizing sports television by creating a platform that provides a real-time, arena-like experience for fans at an internet scale. The company, led by CTO Ari Borensztein, faced several technical challenges, such as achieving ultra-low latency streaming, synchronization among millions of viewers, and allowing live commentary and reactions. To address these challenges, Playback adopted WebRTC for real-time delivery and later integrated LiveKit to ensure scalability and performance, which allowed them to handle content rights with the NBA and offer features like adaptive bitrate and advanced codecs. Instead of a complete system overhaul, Playback gradually migrated to LiveKit, enabling them to expand their feature set with functionalities such as live stages for fan interaction, multistreaming, and instant replay support. Emphasizing collaboration as a core feature, Playback aims to enhance user engagement by leveraging LiveKit's developer-friendly SDKs and focusing on unique user experiences, while advising developers to utilize existing solutions to streamline product development and focus on business differentiation.

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