Winning the Japanese Market: 17LIVE Outpaced Competitors with CDNetworks

17LIVE

17LIVE is a rapidly growing live streaming platform and company based in Taiwan. Since its inception in 2015, it has expanded operations to Japan and gained immense popularity among young people. Typically, there were 3 key applications aimed at providing 17LIVE with additional monetization opportunities. They are 17LIVE (Live Streaming), WAVE (Audio Streaming) and Hands up (E-commerce live streaming). Fast forwarding to January-December 2020 and 2021, data.ai reports that the number of downloads and sales from 17LIVE during in January-December 2020 and 2021 make the company Japan’s largest live-streaming platform.

As the platform gained momentum, it faced challenges of delivering high-quality live streaming content to millions of users while ensuring a seamless user experience for all of them. From the company’s inception, CDNetworks has been 17LIVE’s long-term partner, applying world-leading streaming media technologies to resolve every streaming media challenge faced in 17LIVE’s streaming evolution.

As 17LIVE's user community expanded, the company faced numerous obstacles and pain points that required attention to sustain and elevate its live streaming offerings. Below are a selection of these challenges.

Infrastructure Constraints Impeding International Expansion: With a vision to "foster human connections through live technology," 17LIVE has consistently prioritized catering to its worldwide user community. To fulfill this mission, 17LIVE sought a CDN provider capable of delivering a resilient network infrastructure to guarantee seamless expansion of its live streaming operations, particularly in regions like China, which possess their own distinct network transmission standards and regulations.

Enhancing Streaming Performance: Serving a vast, multinational user base, ensuring seamless and low-latency streaming became imperative for 17LIVE, as it guaranteed a positive interactive experience across the three apps mentioned. An increasing user base on these apps directly correlated to higher profits, further emphasizing the significance of CDNetworks' ability to deliver reliable performance across diverse network conditions and devices.

High Demands for Diverse Interactive Capabilities: To render live streaming both engaging and entertaining, the aforementioned three apps posed extremely stringent functional requirements to CDNetworks' Media Delivery Solutions. These requirements were vital for boosting 17LIVE's user engagement and platform traffic growth by employing intuitive methods to draw users to content, such as content thumbnails or snippets.

Rising Content Moderation & Archival Burden: With the unprecedented surge in platform users and live streamers, the daily task of moderating and archiving content on 17LIVE has seen a substantial increase. This exponential growth rendered manual, real-time content moderation unfeasible. Consequently, 17LIVE sought a solution that could moderate and archive content while simultaneously enhancing operational efficiency and reducing labor costs.

Round-the-Clock Issue Resolution Challenges: As a 24/7 live streaming platform, 17LIVE necessitates round-the-clock support services to tackle any issues that may arise at any moment.

To tackle these challenges, 17LIVE opted for CDNetworks and its customized solutions.

Seamless Global Connectivity with Enhanced Cross-Border Streaming

With a presence of over 2,800 Points of Presence across more than 70 countries and regions globally, CDNetworks furnishes 17LIVE with premium CDN and streaming distribution services, granting the company a distinct competitive advantage in the market.

Furthermore, CDNetworks exceeded expectations by presenting its China Premium Service (CPS) to ensure robust network connectivity between China's prominent key opinion leaders (KOLs) and their international audience. This CPS solution crafted a direct and secure communication pathway between Mainland China and Hong Kong, negating the dependence on the public internet route. Consequently, CDNetworks' Advanced CPS facilitated a reduction in streaming latencies for 17LIVE by approximately 75% compared to standard routes, and substantially elevated the streaming performance of 17LIVE’s KOLs in China. This enabled seamless streaming, even without the need to navigate the intricate ICP filing process.

Thanks to CPS, 17LIVE was able to recruit some KOLs from China to provide more quality content for its global viewers.

Powerful FLV Streaming Capability

With over 20 years of CDN video experience, CDNetworks’ extensive expertise is unsurpassed when it comes to supporting streaming media protocols. For example, our FLV live streaming solution reduced content delivery latencies to as low as 3 seconds and supported massive distribution content while offering 17LIVE unrivaled cost-effectiveness. These benefits made the FLV live streaming solution an excellent fit for our 17LIVE, which required uninterrupted live streaming around the clock. Our FLV solution also helped 17LIVE balance user experience and cost. Moreover, CDNetworks stands out amongst numerous CDN vendors with the support of FLV large volume distribution.

“Unlike streaming solutions from other CDN vendors, CDNetworks supports FLV large-volume distribution. This cost-effective solution allows us to offer live streaming services with latencies as low as 3 seconds, ensuring a truly seamless and real-time interaction between our streamers and viewers.” – Andy Tseng, Sr. Engineering Director at 17LIVE

Comprehensive Streaming Features

In addition to superior low-latency streaming performance, CDNetworks equipped 17LIVE with a number of ancillary features, including screenshot, recording, and storage functions. These features not only enhance the visual effects of the company’s user interface, but also create a truly immersive user experience.

Furthermore, CDNetworks offered a comprehensive content moderate mechanism that was customized for 17LIVE to efficiently manage its platform content. Using this mechanism, 17LIVE can easily manage live streaming archives and block streams promptly based on automatically generated moderator result. This capability enhanced management operations of the live streaming platform and minimized any potential negative impact on the 17LIVE brand image.

Perfect Terminal Experience with Transcoding

To help our valued customer, 17LIVE, create a seamless end-to-end user interactive experience, CDNetworks utilized various transcoding techniques to convert live streams into lower bitrates to adapt to varying network conditions and a wide range of screen sizes on end user devices in various content scenarios.

24/7 Dedicated Support

As a rapidly growing startup, 17LIVE faced wide-ranging technical issues of Media Delivery and CDN. In particular, 17LIVE needed CDNetworks to provide multidimensional and real-time support. To that end, CDNetworks formed a dedicated work group to provide comprehensive services that included business analysis, instant message services, policy customization and optimization, configuration validation, emergency response, and proactive optimization. CDNetworks also arranged periodic business reviews for 17LIVE to boost iterations of its key technologies.

“The CDNetworks support team has been incredibly responsive and helpful throughout our partnership. Their 24/7 dedicated support has resolved issues promptly, and their multi-dimensional streaming analytics for businesses provides valuable insights that allow us to continuously improve our streaming performance.” – Andy Tseng, Sr. Engineering Director at 17LIVE

In conclusion, 17LIVE’s success in resolving media delivery and CDN issues can be attributed to its success with CDNetworks. With CDNetworks as its trusted partner, 17LIVE’s business is thriving as it continues to capture, captivate, and engage millions of users across Asia and beyond.

• 1. With a network infrastructure supported by over 2,800 Points of Presence, CDNetworks ensured a seamless viewing experience for 17LIVE’s 60 million+ users.
  2. CDNetworks’ FLV large-volume distribution offered live streaming services with latencies as low as 3 seconds, which greatly benefits the customer’s current and future live streaming requirements, bringing more possibilities for 17LIVE’s business.
  3. CDNetworks provided a one-stop media delivery solution that included screenshots, recording, storage, and content moderation, helping 17LIVE improve operational efficiencies and save costs.
  4. By utilizing Transcoding and Low Bandwidth High Definition (LBHD), 17LIVE can dynamically lower the bitrate while maintaining the same video quality.
  5. The Advanced CPS adopted by 17LIVE reduced streaming latency by nearly 75% compared to general route, enabling seamless streaming without requiring ICP paperwork.
  6. CDNetworks offered 24/7 Dedicated Support to provide wide ranging services, ensuring continuous business sustainability for 17LIVE.