Maestro.io
Los Angeles, California
Interactive Experiences, Live events, Gamification, Audience Engagements
AWS EventBridge, AWS S3, AWS CDK
A Double-Win Opportunity to Grow the Customer Base
Maestro founder and CEO Ari Evans viewed the opportunity as a double win. Amazon Web Services (AWS) had approached him about integrating the Maestro streaming video platform with Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS), a managed live streaming service that allows businesses to build engaging video experiences.
With access to access to a wide range of video management tools, customers can leverage the Maestro platform to create on-demand video experiences and build branded streaming sites. Customers can also monetize videos through subscription services, ticketed events, fan clubs, and live shopping.
“Our platform complements Amazon IVS by providing no-code capabilities so non-developers can build and monetize interactive videos,” Evans says. “AWS can offer the joint solution to their customers as we can also do to our customers—the integration expands our market significantly.”
Jake Hurst, who manages business development for the Amazon IVS solution, adds, “We were hoping to have IVS become one of the video options in the Maestro platform that Maestro could offer to its customers. And we also realized the Maestro platform is a valuable service that AWS customers could also use to engage with their audiences.”
The challenge for Maestro was to integrate the two solutions. Maestro has teamed up with other streaming providers, and those providers offered the required professional services for connecting the services. In this case, Maestro would be responsible.
“Each streaming provider has a unique architecture and set of APIs,” Evans says. “We have the expertise internally to take on such a project, but we wanted to accelerate the project timeline so that Maestro and AWS could both go to market sooner with the new offering.”
Maestro.io
Maestro is a monetization and interactive video platform that enables brands and creators to build fully branded video websites and take back control of their content, their fans, and their revenue.
In minutes, customers can get set up with live streams, video-ondemand, ticketing, subscriptions, live shopping, tipping, and more. Our easy-to-use technology powers the biggest names in music, sports, gaming, and media, including Billie Eilish, Epic Games, Microsoft, and Apple.
Inspired by what Shopify did for e-commerce brands and what Canva has done to raise the level of professional design output without any prior training or experience, Maestro is redesigning the content ecosystem to put the power and control in the hands of content owners and creators.
Key Challenges
AWS Services
Knowing that the integration would require expertise with the AWS infrastructure environment and the Amazon IVS service, AWS referred Evans to two potential partners. Avahi was the clear choice for Maestro.
“Avahi listened carefully and came up to speed quickly on how our platform works,” says Evans. “They gave us a professional proposal that was on-target —we did not have to keep going back and forth to get the plan right. Combined with their experience in working with AWS services, this gave us confidence they could deliver the solution on time, and the value they committed to delivering matched the cost.”
Hurst also realized the value Avahi could deliver: “Avahi has experience across the breadth of our serverless products like AWS Lambda and Amazon EventBridge, which are important elements to the Maestro integration with IVS. Avahi moved quickly and was willing to handle a short-term engagement. They understood the business problem, created a statement of work, and delivered in a matter of weeks.”
A Streaming Video Solution Easy to Roll Out to Customers
The Avahi engineering team first designed the solution architecture and mapped the journey of customers—from entering the Maestro portal to consuming Amazon IVS, creating streaming videos, and then saving their videos. Avahi also set up the Maestro-IVS integration within an infrastructure-as-a-code architecture, using AWS Cloud Development Kit and TypeScript. For coding the serverless computing Amazon Lambda function, Avahi engineers used a Node.js environment.
Avahi then deployed the middleware account into Maestro’s production account and created scripts to streamline the deployment process when new customers need to be onboarded. The scripts build out the infrastructure on a customer’s AWS account, and then Maestro has a simple process to copy and paste values into the platform, so the customer is ready to go with video production.
Avahi also developed a process to extract metadata from IVS to create the logic for video tags and coded a custom function to enable customers to trim videos. Customers can preview live streams before they go live to sync the audio and the background.
“Avahi stayed on course with their initial implementation plan, and the project flowed smoothly as they did a great job in coordinating communications with AWS,” Evans says. “Being able to tap into their expertise was key because the AWS environment was new to us. We had to learn how the infrastructure as a service is assembled and how the AWS IAM system works. The engineers were diligent in working through any issues to deliver a viable solution.”
When AWS customers want to use IVS for their live-stream video workloads on the Maestro platform, they can now integrate that workload into their AWS account. Any usage of IVS for live video is then billed to that customer account, which makes it easier from a pricing perspective for customers to deploy Maestro. “The integration architecture Avahi set up made this possible,” says Hurst.
Founder, Bravo Foxtrot
