Kiswe Hosts Global, Interactive Fan Experiences

“We know that we can rely on PubNub to scale and support our global events of any size.” Scott Miller, VP of Engineering at Kiswe

Meet Kiswe

Founded as a way to engage digital audiences and communities, Kiswe creates live-streams where entertainers can deliver personalized content to their fans in real time, regardless of physical location. With Kiswe, content creators have produced everything from private events to major broadcasts—hosting live events for some of the world’s largest broadcasters, sports leagues, and music labels—such as the NBA, MLS, and Turner Sports. 

Their versatile solutions and cloud video production platform allow their customers to produce all of the elements of a live event in one place. Using interactive live-streams with features like real-time chat, polls, watch parties, and integrations with exclusive merch, customers can own the content of their events while fostering fan engagement and participation. 

To help power these engaging fan experiences, Kiswe relies on PubNub for their chat infrastructure. 

Scaling chat infrastructure to handle global events of any size 

Before switching to building with PubNub, Kiswe’s VP of Engineering, Scott Miller, and his team sought out a solution that would ensure that their platform operates reliably and in real time to handle a large influx of traffic for their virtual concerts. They knew they needed a partner that could scale without concurrency limits or latency issues, which is why Kiswe turned to PubNub. 

Now, by relying on PubNub, their platform hosts large events with real-time chat at scale. “PubNub helps us feel prepared for large events,” said Miller. “We know that we can rely on PubNub to scale and support our global events of any size.” This reliability is crucial for Kiswe, because it allows them to truly focus on delivering interactive live events to global audiences without worrying about delays.

In fact, their platform has even gone on to host the largest ticketed live-streaming concert with the popular seven-member band, BTS, which had over 756,000 viewers. “With PubNub, we were able to host an event with BTS that ended up setting a new Guinness Book of World Records for the most attendees during a live-stream concert,” said Miller. 

Building chat that encourages fan engagement and participation  

Using PubNub, Kiswe can build an interactive chat experience that connects global fans during online concerts and virtual events. “These large events create a lot of traffic quickly, which is why we rely on PubNub to help power our chat during events,” said Miller.

With PubNub’s reliable chat infrastructure, Kiswe’s customers can create engaging social experiences for their fans with real-time features—like chat, polls, GIFs, and presence to know how many fans are online—added alongside a live-stream, to create a two-way conversation between broadcasters and their fans. 

“We've done large events with global audiences, and during those events we’ve had people join in from 200 countries, and they are very interactive,” said Miller. Having these chat features implemented during live-streams increases fan participation, making at-home viewing more engaging. 

These immersive capabilities create a personal connection between broadcasters and their audience—providing a memorable fan experience that is the equivalent of meeting their favorite artists, performers, or sports teams—something that wouldn’t be possible at an in-person venue with thousands of people.

Quickly creating custom messaging solutions 

In addition to building an interactive chat experience for audiences of any size, Miller and his team have found that PubNub’s flexible and easy-to-use documentation allows them to quickly create custom messaging solutions around who and how many people can receive messages during a live event.  

“We've built a lot of our mechanisms and scaling using the PubNub SDKs, and put our own special sauce behind it,” said Miller. With PubNub, their dev team now has the building blocks they need to quickly spin up solutions for who can read or write in a chat. 

For Kiswe, this is valuable because it gives them the flexibility to build to fit the needs of their customers without having to start from scratch. “PubNub’s SDKs allow us to easily build for any application, whether it's an Android app, an iOS app, JavaScript on the front end, or on the backend using Python,” said Miller. As a result, they are able to scale their platform with secure features to host their customers' live-stream events. 

Operating reliably during live events 

Kiswe trusts PubNub to power their chat during virtual events because they are confident that we can operate reliably and at scale to support audiences of any size. 

“PubNub’s reliability and latency of delivery is important to us as a partner because we’re dealing with a lot of traffic globally,” said Miller. And knowing that they can rely on PubNub’s live event support team to provide them with quick solutions is essential for Miller and his team. “With PubNub support, I’ve received very quick responses and solutions when needed, which is important to us, since our platform is handling live events that must be able to meet the demand of our users.”

If you would like to learn how PubNub can help you create interactive live events with features like real-time chat, polls, GIFs, user presence, and more—get in touch with our team of experts.