When I joined YouNow in mid-2013, the live social video landscape looked drastically different; the scene was nascent and there were no major players besides Twitch, which was focused on gaming. The stars were starting to align though, lowering the barriers to entry for companies building live streaming solutions: “Smart” mobile devices were becoming common; the public internet infrastructure was offering better performance at home and on the move. Most importantly, the building blocks for a scalable, low-latency video solution were becoming available.

Back in the day, the number one KPI that the YouNow video team looked at was end-to-end latency. Our hypothesis was that latency had a defining impact on the level of engagement between the broadcaster and the viewers, and therefore the overall product experience. Engagement was key, and we invested in it. We practically wrote the playbook on how to build an engaging live video streaming application.

In 2013, our number one priority was to build Guest Broadcast — a few-to-many experience. We thought it was going to be a killer feature. At the time, our entire video infrastructure was built around Flash Video, and RTMP. HLS and MPEG-DASH were coming to prominence, and many of our competitors decided to use HTTP-based protocols for their streaming solutions. We needed low latency, and Flash slowed us down. It was clear, too, that Flash was dying, and on the way out, and that we needed to find an alternative.

We decided to take a major bet and transition all of our clients from RTMP-based clients to WebRTC. The idea was to create an asymmetric solution: publishing would happen in WebRTC, and consumption would continue using our battle-tested RTMP infrastructure. It was a double win — real time between broadcasters thanks to WebRTC, and low end-to-end latency at scale courtesy of RTMP.

A few years ago, WebRTC had very little adoption, particularly in our space. Introducing a young technology into a production used by millions was risky, but we had conviction in our design and asked our top engineers to build the magic box that would power our Guest Broadcast features.

Figure 1 — The original engineering design for a pipeline in the “magic box”

Four months later, we had our magic box, and the results were eye popping. Across the board, Guest Broadcast improved our main KPIs by double figures. In turn, the broadcasters made the tool their own, and have come up with new use cases for the technology.

Guest Broadcast has become a cornerstone of the product and engineering culture we have in the company. We see ourselves as innovators who lean into bold technological decision-making.

Figure 2 — The impact of Guest Broadcast

Props Project is the natural evolution of the same thought process behind Guest Broadcast, taking it to the next level. From few to many, to many-to-many.

Our mission is to create a robust developer-oriented network to accommodate a wide variety of consumer facing interactive video experiences. A myriad of interconnected Selective Forwarding Units (SFUs) creates an adaptive WebRTC cloud-of-streams, and allows for an efficient delivery of real-time streams between all participants.

Figure 3 — Many-to-Many network built on SFUs

We are building this network with the intention of it becoming a blank canvas for developers to paint on, and make it their own. We believe that we are offering the community the best available technology to create distributed video apps, making it easier for developers to create elaborate, powerful apps whether or not they are hardcore video streaming experts.

Figure 4 — Multiple use cases using Props Many-to-Many technology

We plan to provide open-source client SDKs for iOS and Android powered devices, and a complimentary Server API. Both will encompass key functionalities like authentication, messaging, token and Video APIs, and will enable developers to build their own video room UI/UX on top of it. Each developer can decide from which video topologies to choose — one-to-one, one-to-many, few-to-few, or few-to-many — and have it up and running in no time.

It is our goal to make the creation of highly engaging digital media applications more accessible, and to compensate developers for their dedication in making this vision come to life. We’re setting this infrastructure up for you so that thousands of developers can contribute to this one-of-a-kind ecosystem and earn in proportion to the quality of their work and their efforts.

To learn more about the Props Project and to get involved, join our Telegram and sign up for our mailing list.

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We’re excited to announce that we are partnering with CoinList and Republic Crypto to launch the Props pre-sale to accredited and non-accredited investors, respectively. We are the third token to launch on CoinList (following their successful partnerships with Filecoin and Blockstack), and we are proud to be the first to launch on Republic Crypto’s platform. Our partnership with Republic Crypto, in particular, ensures that Props will be widely distributed among all of our earliest supporters, all of whom are now eligible for unique pre-sale benefits.

If you’re an accredited investor, please sign up on CoinList to ensure you get regular updates ahead of registration (November 29) and the sale (December 11). If you’re an non-accredited investor, please stay tuned for information about how to sign up on Republic Crypto closer to the sale date (December 11).