Riff Media delivers innovative interactive experiences to millions of live-streaming fans

“Realtime is our pinnacle user experience. Any downtime is catastrophic and directly impacts our bottom line because all monetization is based on it.” explains Steve Petersen, CTO of Riff Media. 

Riff’s fundamental concept is live “rooms” that support group media consumption over chat, voice, and video. Monetization includes gift-giving in realtime, members only rooms (subscriptions), social commerce, and ticketed events. To stay ahead in the highly-competitive social media space, Riff needs to provide a flawless experience to their users while rapidly innovating on new community features and revenue opportunities for creators/influencers. 

As the user base grew, Riff’s hosted realtime service, which supported the core chat functionality, started having trouble at scale and during traffic bursts. Their server team was constantly swamped by firefighting and having to pick, scale, and maintain the cluster, which left them unable to focus on building higher-level features.

Riff wanted a fully hosted realtime service that could handle tens of thousands of users per room, and unpredictable traffic spikes of tens of thousands of users. 

To support the core live stream chat functionality, the service had to provide low latencies of under 250ms to all users, regardless of where they were in the world. And beyond chat, it had to effortlessly carry all the other realtime functionality on Riff’s roadmap.  

Riff wanted to ensure a high quality of service for all their users, even across unreliable mobile networks. Ably’s fail-safe mechanisms for data continuity and its guarantees for exactly-once delivery and idempotency would allow Riff to deliver a consistent user experience. 

Ably’s elastic distributed system with unlimited surge capacity and 5-9s SLA provided Riff the certainty that the QoS will be preserved even during large, unexpected user surges.

What sealed the deal was Ably’s MQTT adapter, which allowed Riff to seamlessly integrate Ably into their stack in record time.

“The conversion from CloudAMQP to Ably was pretty fast, we completed the cutover in about a week including performance testing. It was super easy and maintained backward compatibility with the messaging protocol“ says Petersen.

The biggest win for Riff comes from using Ably’s out-of-the-box functionality that is specifically designed for building live and interactive applications. Using Ably’s Presence and Connection state recovery allows them to build creative interactive functionality faster and easier than their competition, maintaining their upper hand in the market.

“We are constantly innovating live streaming and engagement features for our product. Having a rock-solid realtime infrastructure has allowed us to build 3 times faster on higher-level features that use the realtime services, like chat, presence, and other features like gift battles or polls.” says Petersen.

Today, Riff can reach millions of users with their rich live-streaming features, including user presence, chat interactions, and notifications, all built on Ably. As the CTO explained, “Realtime is mission critical for us, and using Ably and its SDKs for Android, iOS and Ruby/Rails server, improved our client and server reliability drastically.” 

Beyond savings in cloud costs and over $230k in engineering costs in the first year, Ably’s consumption-based pricing model supports their spiky usage model and allows Riff to estimate spending better as they grow.