Red5 Pro got its start back in 2005 when it reverse-engineered Adobe Flash’s Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP), creating an open source alternative to the Flash communication method, eventually productizing and licensing a paid version. “We were betting on people caring about latency more than anything else,” recalled Chris Allen, Red5 Pro’s CEO.
The bet paid off.
Today, Red5 Pro solves two significant problems: broadcast latency and the ability to facilitate multiple user interactions in live streams. By providing low latency WebRTC live video streaming at scale, Red5 Pro customers—which include sports broadcasters, live drone streaming for surveillance, live auctions, and sports betting providers—are creating “wow” moments in real-time with ultra-low-latency video streaming.
No matter the customer, the prime use cases for Red5 Pro are latency-sensitive, especially when dealing with combinations of multiple features, like chatting and broadcasting simultaneously. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the need for live, interactive, and concurrent video experiences.
For Red5 Pro’s cost-conscious customers, hosting with a hyperscale cloud provider like AWS, Azure, or Google is out of the question mainly because of bandwidth costs. The Red5 Pro solution, in many ways, is like traditional CDN based delivery with price-per-gigabyte being a significant factor when doing one to many streams.
Many of Red5 Pro’s customers are better suited for an Alternative Cloud provider like Linode because they’re developers at small- and medium-sized businesses. “They need something small, nimble, and low-cost,” said Chris. “When we work with our customers, part of the process is to make genuine recommendations based on what we think is best for them. Often, and especially for latency-sensitive use cases, that’s the Alternative Cloud and providers like Linode.”
Chris was attracted to Linode because both companies share a common focus on the developer community.
“We make it possible for developers to build apps on their own and to their liking, and they can deploy the solution onto the cloud network of their choice. They often choose Linode, mainly due to the availability of documentation, consistency of experience, and low cost.”
Red5 Pro strives to give as much power as possible to the user, whether based on geography, technology, SDK orientation, or customizability. “We want people to be able to build whatever’s in their dreams and make it a reality, rather than dumbing it down to the common denominator,” said Chris.
Red5 Pro can fully manage their customers’ Linode accounts if that’s what the customer prefers. The relationship can be as hands-on or hands-off as the customer wants, and Red5 Pro manages both models exceptionally well. Red5 Pro enables developers to have freedom of choice by supporting Terraform. Elasticity is the key feature of this open-source infrastructure-as-code software tool and gives Red5 Pro users the ability to expand.
Looking forward, Red5 Pro expects to benefit from Linode’s ongoing geographic expansion. Linode data centers support 11 global markets, enabling secure and reliable networking through its network backbone. Machines can communicate with one another, reducing latency and lowering the friction of scale. Red5 Pro’s low-latency, high-bandwidth use cases for communicating and messaging in real-time are only going to become more relevant and widely in demand over time.
Bet on it.
