Online marketplace Voggt is on a mission to make shopping more fun. More than one million users across Europe use the mobile-first application, which combines live video and ecommerce to buy and sell goods through interactive, community-driven experiences. To take its offering to the next level, Voggt integrated Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS), a managed live streaming service that uses the same streaming technology and global infrastructure that powers Twitch. By implementing Amazon IVS Real-Time Streaming, Voggt dropped its average latency from 12 seconds to 60 milliseconds while reducing video streaming costs by 70 percent.
“Video is the backbone of everything we do. It helps us build the trust and relationships needed to make Voggt work, but we don’t innovate in video; we innovate on what we can build on top of it. At first, we used RTMP-based technology which gave us 12-second latency. But it’s been a constant fight to lower that threshold, so when we discovered Amazon IVS, we were excited,” said Lucas Scariot, Voggt CTO and Founder.
Currently available in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Austria, Voggt averages 7,000 auctions and 300 shows per day on Amazon IVS, totaling around 30,000 live stream broadcast hours per month.
Voggt at a glance
Voggt launched as a consumer-to-consumer platform of individual sellers of collectibles in 2021. With Voggt’s support, those sellers have established strong businesses and communities. Voggt now also includes professional sellers, and is expanding into new markets, with fashion the primary focus for 2024. Using the platform, sellers launch live streaming shows that average three hours each and comprise a series of one-minute auctions, during which time buyers ask questions and make purchases. Since human interaction is central to the Voggt experience, video quality greatly influences sellers’ ability to generate sales, with each second of delay negatively impacting the bottom line.
“We managed to achieve 8 second median latency with RTMP, but we hit critical mass. The community started to acknowledge and call out the latency issues,” Scariot shared. “Then one of our engineers found Amazon IVS Low-Latency Streaming, which uses HLS, and built a proof of concept in an evening. We tested it with Voggt and were thrilled to log a 1-3 second latency; then we found out about the Amazon IVS Real-Time Streaming feature, which supports sub-300 millisecond latency.”
The Amazon IVS integration journey
Once it got started, Voggt was able to run its live streams on Amazon IVS Real-Time Streaming in less than three weeks, making it one of the first customers to leverage the WebRTC-based feature. Voggt’s engineers worked closely with support teams from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deploy and calibrate the implementation, with Voggt input helping to inform the product roadmap. The first Amazon IVS-powered live streams for Voggt launched in October 2023 and its users immediately noticed a difference.
“We started with a few beta testers and word spread quickly on the platform. Our users are really happy,” Scariot shared. “The Amazon IVS SDK has been easy to work with and the quality of the technology is really helping us grow.”
Data-informed development
As the Voggt team continues to build out new platform features, they’re able to leverage the comprehensive data and analytics provided by Amazon IVS to inform platform development and ensure sellers and buyers enjoy a quality experience.
“We deploy Amazon IVS for thousands of sellers streaming from different types of mobile devices, which can impact their broadcasts. We don’t ever want a buyer to tune into an auction and think Voggt is down, when the issue is actually on the seller’s end. Amazon IVS gives us a lot of data to understand and diagnose problems so we can guide sellers,” Scariot concluded. “Since switching to Amazon IVS, we’ve seen an increase in many show lengths on the platform. Our users get a better experience and we’re able to lower our costs.”
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