State-of-the-Art Webcasting

Kastio was transformed from a plain piece of software into a feature-rich experience.

The company and product

Kastio is an interactive webcasting platform designed for business and training events.

With its initial focus on marketers, it was built to serve as a white-labeled tool that can be easily embedded into any website.

The Challenge

To transform it from a plain webcasting suite into a state-of-the-art platform, we had to solve a number of challenges.

One was ensuring that the video stream, along with the extra content (surveys, slides, pictures), would be delivered in a synchronous manner to all audiences.

The player also had to be highly customizable and embeddable to allow content creators to use it to stream their content from their own websites.

Key challenges of the project included:

Building a database with information about the audience for the purpose of designing effective sales strategies.
Ensuring that Kastio is easily embeddable on highly different websites.
Providing synchronized viewing for geographically dispersed audiences.

Key challenges included

Building a database with information about the audience

Ensuring that Kastio is easily embeddable on different websites

Synchronized viewing for geographically dispersed audiences

Building a database with information about the audience

Ensuring that Kastio is easily embeddable on different websites

Synchronized viewing for geographically dispersed audiences

The Process

To synchronize the feed, our backend developers crafted a sophisticated solution from scratch, integrating the Wowza Streaming Engine, the JW Player, and a custom-made Flash object.

They also built a real-time analytics platform that tracks user activity during each webcast.

To create a lightweight, easily embeddable player, frontend developers opted to build a webcast widget as a single snippet of a dedicated script link that needs to be placed on the user’s website. The script creates an autonomous space that runs the client’s webcast application.

This is how we made it happen:

Integrated three objects to create a perfect backend.
Used scripts to create a lightweight, easily embeddable player.
Leveraged Java and Wowza API to deliver a perfectly synchronized video stream.

Team’s voice

Łukasz Wnęk

Tech Lead

This is how we did it

We pushed our envelope in terms of the technology stack, since using Wowza's API server also allowed us to extend its core functionality. Additionally, using a pack of Java plugins, we implemented authentication and webcast play duration measurement. This solution turned out to be flexible enough to also allow for syncing during VOD replays, without us having to change even a single line of code.

The Outcome

Kastio transformed from a plain piece of webcasting software into a state-of-the-art, feature-rich webcasting platform.

Its advanced functionalities allow the presenter to create visually rich webcasts with additional graphics and videos. While streaming, they can simultaneously monitor the engagement and activity of the audience, using provided live stats and feedback capabilities. Presenters can also communicate with viewers via surveys.

The platform is now also equipped with features allowing the presenters to create secure broadcasts. In such cases, the use of the webcasting widget is limited to authorized domains only.

The success of this project hinged on the following factors:

Leveraging existing and custom-made elements.
Ensuring user-friendliness.
Building a real-time analytics tool to support webcasters’ decision-making processes.