Veeps Transforms The Way Artists Connect With Fans

“Being able to have that reliability allows us to focus on building a great user experience without having to scale every single part of our infrastructure." Kyle Heller, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Veeps

Meet Veeps

Veeps is dedicated to bringing artists closer to their fans. Their revolutionary platform presents a new type of live-stream experience that gives the artist the freedom to interact directly with their audience and create an engaging, one-of-a-kind experience for their fans. Both artists and fans are able to access their platform from anywhere with their web, mobile, or tv app. “Our platform really makes the live experience more accessible to a global audience, which brings people together who might not be able to experience a concert together otherwise,” said Kyle Heller, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Veeps. 

With Veeps, artists have live-streamed from a variety of different locations—from venue performances to living rooms—hosting virtual concerts for thousands of artists, some of which include Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Rufus Wainwright, Brandi Carlile, Pete Yorn, Thomas Rhett, and Liam Payne. Their platform hands the power back to the artist and allows them to choose their live event setting, monetize content up front, and interact directly with their fans. 

To help power these lively and engaging experiences between artists and fans, Veeps relies on PubNub. 

Scaling to handle billions of live chat messages 

Veeps uses PubNub for real-time chat during live concerts. During a live-streamed performance on their platform, artists have the opportunity to read and respond to comments from fans or share messages with their audience in real time—providing the same exciting feeling for users as if an audience member was brought on stage. This two way communication offers a way for artists and fans to connect instantaneously, increasing fan engagement. “In some respects, seeing the chat isn't about what somebody is saying,” said Heller. “But when audience members see that chat happening live, they can feel the energy of the event and feel like they’re really part of something.” 

Before using PubNub to power their real-time chat during virtual events, Veeps had used other solutions that didn’t give them the flexibility they needed to to maintain their infrastructure in-house. They knew that they wanted to be able to scale their product offering to accommodate events with a higher user turnout than expected, while also ensuring that messages were being delivered fast and reliably, no matter the number of concurrent users—which is what drove them to find PubNub. 

Now, by relying on PubNub, their platform can handle live, concurrent messages without latency issues, even as audiences’ spike and dip—which is crucial because the number of users for each live event varies. “We've delivered billions of messages through PubNub,” said Heller. “That is something that we've been very proud of.” As a result, their dev team has peace of mind knowing that they have a reliable chat infrastructure in place so they can focus on building a great user experience. 

Operating reliably and in real time to prevent outages

In addition to creating real-time interaction between artists and fans through chat, Veeps uses PubNub to power a custom-built solution which allows them to continuously push the live video feed of an event to specific web pages using webhooks—which prevents outages on their platform. 

For Heller’s team, this is critical in order to deliver a seamless experience for their users, allowing fans to be fully engaged in the live performance, instead of spending their time refreshing the event page due to outages or delays. 

Reliability is important for Veeps because their platform gives audiences the ability to watch live performances in their preferred environment. Since using PubNub, Veeps has enabled their API to work cross-functionally with different apps and devices. “Being able to have that reliability allows us to focus on building a great user experience without having to scale every single part of our infrastructure,” said Heller. This gives them the flexibility and control to create a unique live music experience for their users, ultimately allowing fans to watch a performance and chat with the artist live. 

By providing a platform for users to watch concerts reliably at home while communicating with fellow fans all over the globe, Veeps is truly pioneering a new kind of home entertainment. “PubNub is a big part of bringing together artists and their fan community into one place and allowing for that interaction to take place, regardless of barriers like location,” said Heller. “They’re helping us create a new frontier in the entertainment space.”

Focusing on the future of their product offering 

With the accelerated growth that Veeps has seen from artists and creators, Heller feels confident that PubNub’s capabilities can continue to support the scalability of their platform long-term. And knowing that they can count on PubNub to provide guidance and creative solutions to help them as they continue to scale is essential for Heller and his team. “The engineering and Solution Architects teams really understand their product,” said Heller. “So when we have a question, there's always a way to get a very fast answer and a creative solution on the fly.” 

Looking to the future as Veeps continues to scale, Heller is excited to focus on the key areas of their product offering that are important to both the artist and fan. “I'm excited to build very intentional, interactive experiences,” said Heller. “There are other vendors out there that can provide real-time solutions, but to be able to have a partner that can strategize and have a solution is a key advantage for us.” 

Building interactive experiences without concurrency limits 

Veeps has transformed the live-streaming experience by creating a new space for artists to connect with their fanbases. With PubNub, Veeps can scale their chat to accommodate a live event of any size, allowing them to operate reliably and in real time without concurrency limits. If you would like to learn how PubNub can help you create engaging, real-time experiences, get in touch with our team of experts.