Stageit + PubNub Connect Music Fans, Artists in Real time

Stageit + PubNub Connect Music Fans, Artists in Real time
Stageit is an online concert venue, allowing performers to broadcast live real-time events, including selling tickets, all within a fully interactive environment. Fans can chat with the event’s artist, and even tip them during the show. Stageit’s artists include Jimmy Buffet, Rick Springfield, Korn, independent artists, as well as YouTube sensations looking for a new way to monetize their multi-million view YouTube videos. Stageit Connects Music Fans to Artists in Real time

Challenge

The appeal of Stageit’s service is the ability for artists to interact in real-time with a large number of fans. In launching its service, Stageit had two key concerns. First, they wanted to power an unlimited number of users to chat live during a real-time show. Secondly, it was critical that users experienced zero downtime. At the time Stageit was using SocketIO and XMPP as a technology solution. However, these technologies didn’t scale effectively resulting in a limited number of chat participants and frequent downtime. After looking at other real-time messaging systems, Stageit ultimately decided to go with The PubNub Real-Time Network. The reasons were simple. PubNub could empower an unlimited amount of fans to interact with artists seamlessly—with no cap on scalability. PubNub also offered unparalleled reliability and wide ranging device support.

PubNub Solution

  1. Stageit’s existing XMPP chat servers and secondary servers worked well until the company hit over 400 people then quickly became unreliable.
  2. Pubnub was used to replace the backend SocketIO and NodeJS servers and worked very well but the XMPP servers were still crashing.
  3. Therefore, Stageit replaced XMPP with PubNub and wrote a Chat Wrapper that talks to PubNub using Goliath to support Business and Security logic.
  4. The system has been successfully tested to support five times their normal capacity, delivering the real-time user experience Stageit set out to create.

PubNub Value

  1. Wider browser and device support.
  2. Redundancy and high-availability.
  3. Reliable and scalable.
  4. APIs are easy to learn.
  5. Stellar service and support.

When we started to experience explosive traffic we turned to The PubNub Real-Time Network to take care of our real-time infrastructure challenges. With the help of their top-notch support and product, we are now able to put all our focus into growing our business, instead of baby sitting our servers.

Evan Lowenstein Founder and CEO