Invaluable: Real Time Video Streaming for Online Auctions

The atmosphere is electric. You can hear the auctioneer’s torrent of speech calling in bids, stoking the audience into an ever increasing frenzy. As the excitement surges, you strain to surmount other bidders. Back-and-forth it goes until the sweet sound of a gavel rings out, declaring you the winner. All it took was a few clicks.

Hold on- “clicks”?

That’s right, Invaluable found a way to export the exhilaration of a live-auction straight into your home. The only way that was possible was to deliver a fully scalable live stream with real-time latency. Fortunately for them, that’s exactly what Red5 Pro provides.

This is the second of our ongoing Use Case Stories, so watch this space for more groundbreaking tech.

Invaluable

As a major provider of high-end eCommerce experiences, Invaluable powers several thousand auction houses worldwide, aggregating much of the world’s most-important and unique items to their thriving online marketplace — and welcoming millions of bidders per month.

Invaluable users can bid on near-priceless items, some during major auction events that can take place over 3 days.

Providing a high-quality video feed, virtual bidders are brought onto the live sales floor of an auction that is taking place in real-time at one of the many thousands of global salerooms, and Invaluable can even “syndicate” the experience to any number of alternate marketplace channel partners at the same time, further increasing the bidder participation rates. Invaluable uses this advanced approach to build an engaging and immersive real-time global exchange with widespread online attendance.

Scaling, Flexibility, and Cost

Invaluable’s success depends upon creating a consistent, seamless user experience by inserting the online bidder alongside the in-person bidders without giving an advantage to either party. This exciting experience further encourages users to stay longer even if they only came for a specific item.

That also means that their video streaming platform needs to scale to meet hundreds of thousands, even millions of users that log in to see or bid on exclusive, one-of-a-kind items. Not only that — Invaluable provisions their product for different auction houses in any number of geographical locations, so it needs to be flexible to adapt to various scenarios, with high performance as a top objective.

Of course, it has to do all those things while remaining cost-effective. With an eCommerce site that sees three million unique users a month, a pay-per-user video solution would not be feasible.

Real-Time Bidding Needs Real-Time Latency

With sub-500 milliseconds of latency, a fully scalable platform, and flexible pricing, Red5 Pro delivered. The proprietary implementation of modern protocols such as WebRTC creates real-time speed while the Red5 Pro Autoscaling Solution responds to increases and decreases in audience size. When the bids are coming in hot, and everybody wants a win, Red5 Pro hammers the decisive gavel.

“A nice thing for us using Red5 Pro is knowing that we can expand and contract and be judicious in our own right about what we are spinning up in terms of provisioning servers. We are growing astronomically, in different markets located in different time zones. As such, we might not need as many servers on at a certain time, on a certain day of the week as we would at another time of day or time zone. That flexibility is going to pay off for us as we grow, and it’s going to be a very manageable experience for us and our customers.”

– DJ Charles, CTO