Announcing Kickflip - Live Mobile Video Streaming for All!

Today, we are extremely pleased to announce the launch of Kickflip, a new live video streaming SDK which gives every mobile app developer the ability to add live HD video broadcasting to their applications in just a few simple lines of code. It's flippin' awesome.

We've also released fully open-source example applications, available for both iOS and Android, which demonstrate how to build a complete cloud-based live video broadcasting network, which you can freely fork and modify for your own purposes.

And, best of all, you try out Kickflip right now for free! You can sign up here with email, or even sign up with your Github account.

Then, you can get started by following this short guide on how to add live video to your apps.

Features

Inspired by the ease of use of other developer-friendly products like Stripe and Parse, we've built Kickflip with developers in mind. All of our SDKs and our documentation are on Github, and our APIs are designed to be as easy to use as possible. In fact, you can start broadcasting right out of the box with just a few lines of code!

Here's how easy it is on iOS:

..and on Android:

A New Kind of Cloud Video

Kickflip uses a new kind of video technology which lowers the cost of live broadcasting by 10-100x. With our robust SDKs, all of the centralized transcoding normally required for HD mobile broadcasting is done on the fly right on the client, and then broadcast directly to a cloud-based Content Distribution Network (the very same one used by Netflix), meaning that Kickflip streams are faster, higher quality and more robust than other streaming solution.

By avoiding the transcoding server farm, your broadcasting costs are significantly lowered, as you're only paying for hosting and bandwidth. And because we pool the CDN usage costs of all Kickflip users, your costs are lower with Kickflip than if you rolled it yourself, plus you get all the benefits of Kickflip support, the robust Kickflip API, the Kickflip community and all of the other Kickflip features.

Robust API and User Accounts

Right out of the box, Kickflip gives you everything you need to start your own video broadcasting network like uStream, LiveStream or Bambuser, but without the need for any other service providers, or even your own backend software. Kickflip can do everything you need! User accounts management, profiles, private broadcasting, avatars, Kickflip has you covered.

Of course, you can use Kickflip just for video broadcasting, and use your own existing user infrastructure, but we've got your back if you need us.

Filters, Zoom, Multi-Region Distribution

Kickflip comes with all of the features you'd expect from a modern cloud video library: pinch zooming, filters (including our personal favorite: night vision), and world-wide content distribution. (Note that zoom and filters currently only work for Android, but will be included in the next iOS update.)

Future Plans

As a small, lean startup, we have a lot of ideas about what we want to do next, but we want your feedback to help guide us.

There's lots of features we're working on - multi-region uploading, multiple format outputs, low-latency RTC compatibility, and cloud transcoding, just to name a few - but we want to make sure that your needs take priority.

So please, try out Kickflip, and let us know your thoughts!

Thanks very much,

Rich, David and Chris

Team Kickflip

PS: if you liked this post, please show us some love on HackerNews!

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