Presented at the IndicThreads.com Software Development Conference 2016 held in Pune, India. More at http://www.IndicThreads.com --

1. The GR8 Road to #fame
Rishabh Jain
To The New Digital
http://www.fame.live

3. LIVE will be the new ‘Selfie’ by 2017
• #fame was launched on 15th April 2015 and was available for
both Android and iOS from day 1.
• Twitter’s Periscope was launched on March 26, 2015 and on
May 26 2015 it was available for Android
• Facebook Live launched in April. (6th April 2016)

4. Some terms that I would be using
• DVR - Digital Video Recorder
• Encoder - Compresses the video to standard format
• Transcoding - converting a given video input into a digital
format that is compatible with most types of Web players and
mobile devices
• RTMP - Real time messaging protocol
• HLS - HTTP Live Streaming
• OTT Platform - Over the Top, delivery of audio and video over
Internet (e.g. Youtube.com)
• Beam - Instead of Stream we call it Beam
• Adaptive Bitrate - Automatically adjusting the video quality
depending on the bandwidth.

5. Contents
What is #fame?
The Solution
Some Key Components
The Need
Evolution/Future

6. What is #fame?
A platform that allows users to broadcast themselves
LIVE
How #fame is fairing
 MAUs: 3M+
 Watch Hours: ~17K / day
 Interactions: ~15M / day
 Multi-Country presence – India, Indonesia and Thailand

7. Key Milestone
 Big Bollywood Events IIFA(Bollywood Awards), Movie Releases
 Entertainment Event Streaming Sunburn Goa, NH-7 Weekender
 Brand Promotions OLA, Myntra, Bacardi, etc
 Celebrity Shows & Movie Promotions Afrojack, Akshay Kumar, S
oha Ali Khan, Kunal Khemu and many more TV and Bollywood ac
tors

8. Contents
What is #fame?
The Solution
Some Key Components
The Need
Evolution/Future

9. Product vision
#fame approached TTN Digital to build a
Live Video Platform with an aim to
Disrupt and Democratize Talent Discovery ecosystem
What #fame needed
 Mobile first highly interactive and personalized (based on
user behavior and preferences) social platform
 User can start beaming live to whole wide world at the
click of button; can watch Videos On Demand as well
 International reach yet Hyper-local

10. Challenges- Business and Technical
 Small turn around time: MVP < 3 months
 Minimal Latency and adaptive quality in Live Streaming
and across low bandwidths
 Real time chat  Publish Subscribe at large scale and
unpredictability
 Diverse ecosystem of mobile devices
 Early Movers Dilemma, Extreme Agility

11. Contents
What is #fame?
The Solution
Some Key Components
The Need
Evolution/Future

12. Demo

13. The Story So Far
April – May(2015)
• Public Launch (Android,
iOS) with improved
features – Moderation,
Instant Live etc.
• CMS and Admin
Jun – Jul(2015)
• IIFA – Arch. And Prod.
Scale-up
• Landscape Mode
• Stickers
• Hashtags
• Carousal Control
• Sharing across App
Aug – Sep (2015)
• Revamped Go Live
Experience
• Follow Famestars On
Sign-up
• Consumer Learning
Journey
• Comments on Videos

14. The Story So Far
Oct – Nov(2015)
• Revamped UI /
Navigation,
Personalization, Social,
FTL
• Indonesia Launch
Dec – Jan(2016)
• Website Launch
• Mobile Responsive Site
• Revamped Search
• Major Bugs and UI/UX
Fixes
• Thailand Launch
• Regionalisation (S.
India, GPS based)
Feb-Mar(2016)
• Portrait
Beaming(Streaming)
• Re-written chat Micro
Service
• Revamped Chat UX
• Major Bugs and UI/UX
Fixes
• Own OTT Platform
(instead of Youtube

15. Solution Architecture (Grails Plugin Based)

16. Thought Behind Initial Design Decisions
 API First Architecture: Mobile First Application
 Grails: RAD and good REST support
 Wowza Server : Good support for protocols & mature
community
 PubNub : Leader in Chat and Instant Messaging
Learning from the Initial Design
 Databases can quickly become point of contention
 Difficult to move fast with Monolithic architecture
 Business wants to move fast but how does Engineering cope
up
Victims of our initial success

17. Learn & Adapt

18. Solution Architecture – Improved & Refined

19. Thoughts behind the Changes
 Smaller chunks of applications should be easier to manage &
scale
 Expanding teams will be easier as smaller specialized apps
 Database load distribution achieved partially
Micro-services with Spring Boot

20. And We learn some more…
 If not done properly, Micro-services can be a dependency
hell
 Few time consuming transactions can result in bad UX
 Performance tuning starts from requirement understanding:
Think to scale
 We needed more database connections
 There are better ways to do calculations & aggregations
 Hope for the best, prepare for the worst

21. Solution Architecture – Current
AngularJS

22. Thoughts Behind the Changes
 Existing APIs made AngularJS as obvious choice for Web App
 Offloading certain calls to Nginx for Smart response caching
 Hazelcast can handle complex queries as well.
 Handling things asynchronously can save a lot of precious
resources
 Server level optimizations  Improves performance from
same H/W
 Spark, Kafka, Hadoop-YARN, Cassandra combination good for
real time/batch aggregations & calculations.
 Developers needed an integrated consistent environment on
local machines  Docker

23. And The Learning Continues…
 150+ servers with 5 different environments
 MySql or Percona or AWS Aurora or Vitess or …
 MongoDB Improvements (Read-Write Separation,
Replication and Sharding)
 Grails 3
 Spring Boot
 Real-time monitoring & pro-active corrections across
multitude of services and 3rd party dependencies

24. And It’s relentless
 Faster encoding mechanisms for better live streaming &
viewing experience
 Better resilience for surges
 Intelligent and self-learning Personalization
 More Data Driven decisions
 Monetization possibilities and experiments

25. For Video Domain enthusiast

26. For Video Domain enthusiast (Behind the scenes)

27. Monitoring & Optimizations

28. Monitoring & Optimizations

29. Other Sources

30. Tech. Stack
Data Storage

31. Contents
What is #fame?
The Solution
Some Key Components
The Need
Evolution/Future

32. Live Steaming And Chat

33. Live Steaming And Chat- Technology making it possible

34. Search

35. Live Steaming And Chat- Technology making it possible

36. Contents
What is #fame?
The Solution
Some Key Components
The Need
Evolution/Future

37. The Road Ahead
Regionalization
Monetization
Private Beams
Gamification
Collaborative Beams
Gratification

38. Rishabhjain15