Moment by Patreon Redefines Virtual Experiences For Fans

“During an event, we have never worried about the reliability of our chat backend services because we know it's being handled on the PubNub side." Shray Bansal, Co-Founder and CTO at Moment.co

Meet Moment

Moment.co is a subsidiary of Patreon and is redefining virtual experiences by providing a platform for artists and creators to create, manage, and host live-stream events where they can connect with their fans globally. 

During these virtual experiences, artists have total control over their performance and can interact with their fans over the course of the live-stream through real-time text chat, as well as voice and video chat. From an intimate live-stream performance in their home to an unparalleled virtual concert on the top of a mountain—like Kygo’s set that took place in the Sunnmore Alps—these ‘Moments’ help create a sense of community among an artist's core fanbase. 

Moment gives artists complete control over their performance and monetization while also removing barriers for the audience. Because their platform must be able to handle traffic for an event of any size, from anywhere in the world, they knew they needed a solution that could provide the scalability and reliability to handle an unlimited amount of concurrent users, which is why Moment turned to PubNub. 

Supporting unlimited concurrent users through reliable chat infrastructure

Using PubNub, Moment is able to scale their in-app chat to handle events of any size. This is essential to their platform, because as audience traffic fluctuates for each event, they need to be able to support unlimited concurrent users without the worry of outages. 

“During an event, we have never worried about the reliability of our chat backend services because we know it's being handled on the PubNub side,” said Shray Bansal, Co-Founder and CTO at Moment. “With PubNub and their live event support team, we are able to truly scale our chat to a large number of concurrent users at a time, and that’s what enables us to bring that interactivity between a creator and their fanbase.” 

Prior to PubNub, Bansal considered building in-house and evaluated multiple platforms while looking for a solution that would be able to handle any amount of message and usage traffic for large-scale events. Ultimately, he made the decision to rely on PubNub to power their chat infrastructure. “I wanted to go with a provider that has the highest stability for concurrency and lowest downtime,” said Bansal. “And that was PubNub.” 

Being able to store and replay chat logs after a live-stream has also been crucial to Bansal and his team, as they find it useful to retrieve user conversations on the backend to understand how to better their platform to meet user expectations.  “That's a key thing that we would have lost out on if we were trying to build in-house,” said Bansal. 

Now, they are able to easily scale their chat to meet their customers' needs without worrying about outages or delays, which is critical when users are sending thousands of messages simultaneously. For Bansal and his team, this has provided peace of mind and allowed them to save on development and maintenance time. “Knowing that PubNub is reliable on the backend means that my team doesn’t need to worry about outages,” said Bansal. “We can focus more on our product.”

Delivering virtual fan experiences with interactive features 

Besides using PubNub for in-app chat, Moment by Patreon also uses PubNub to power engaging features—like notifications when someone purchases merchandise or tips an artist—and leaderboards that are synced to display these interactions to their audience in real time during a live-stream concert, podcast, or comedy show. 

When fans join a live chat during a show, the artist can leverage these features and interact with their audience and even individual fans instantaneously. This creates an exciting two-way communication experience that connects artists to their core fans, and vice versa, that wouldn’t be possible at an in-person event. “In terms of engagement, when an artist is able to speak to their fans and have that connection, it's a really special moment and PubNub is crucial to enabling that,” said Bansal.

Through presence detection, their platform also allows fans to see when other users join a chat. This gives fans the ability to easily form their own group chats with family and friends while watching these online performances. This helps to foster a greater sense of community among the audience. “User engagement is a core part of our experience, allowing fans to chat with each other and engage back and forth,” said Bansal. And by providing a chat history that displays the most recent messages, fans can now quickly jump right into the discussion without missing out on previous conversations. Ultimately, these interactive features powered by PubNub enable increased engagement from artists and fans, in the Moment platform. 

Scaling to accommodate a growing user base

Looking to the future as Moment continues to grow, Bansal estimates that events with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, will continue to take place on their platform. And he is confident that they’ll be able to easily scale to support this growth. “The biggest key is stability as we grow,” said Bansal. “That's the main reason why we chose PubNub.”

If you would like to learn how PubNub can help you power a reliable and scalable chat infrastructure with features push notifications, leaderboards, user presence, and more—get in touch with our team of experts.