I almost gave up on adding live video.
Every guide I found assumed I was rebuilding my backend from scratch. Spin up a media server. Configure FFmpeg. Build an ingest pipeline. Manage token auth. Handle real-time transcoding. And then maybe, maybe you’ll get a playback URL.
I wasn’t trying to build a streaming platform. I just wanted to let users go live from inside my app. No detours. No separate stack.
The rest of the product was done, a working dashboard for creators with login, content management, and a clean frontend. All I needed was a simple way to drop in live video without tearing through the backend.
But everything out there made it feel like I had to become a video infra engineer overnight. That was the turning point. I started looking for a different way, something that felt like plugging in Stripe or SendGrid. Not rewriting my app’s core. That’s when I found a much simpler path.
My constraints were simple
The product was already live. Users could log in, manage their content, and interact with each other, the backend was solid. I wasn’t about to rip it apart just to add live video.
I had no interest in setting up streaming infrastructure from scratch. No self-hosted media servers. No configuring transcoding jobs. No wiring OBS to some CDN with tokens and firewalls in the way.
I just wanted something dead simple:
A stream key I could plug into OBS.
A playback URL I could drop into the frontend.
And if I got lucky, maybe automatic recording without extra setup.
That was the entire requirement list.
I didn’t need full-blown broadcasting software. I didn’t want to learn how HLS segments work. I just needed to go live, quickly without messing with what I’d already built.
How I got live working in 10 minutes
After poking around for something less painful, I landed on FastPix, a video API platform built for developers like me who don’t want to become video engineers just to ship live streaming.
I used their Live API to spin up a stream. One POST request, and I immediately got:
- an RTMPS ingest URL for OBS,
- and a public HLS playback URL for embedding.
No config files, no delays, no console deep-dives.
I plugged the ingest URL into OBS, hit “Start Streaming,” and within seconds, I was live.
Then I dropped the HLS URL into my frontend using hls.js. Playback was smooth across devices. Adaptive bitrate was already handled. I didn’t touch encoding settings or mess with cross-browser hacks.
No backend updates. No authentication flows. No session plumbing. It just worked, which honestly felt suspicious at first.
But it held up. And it got me from “I want to test live video” to “my app now supports live video” in under 10 minutes.
What I didn’t have to do
Here’s what surprised me the most: all the heavy lifting just... disappeared.
I didn’t spin up any media servers. No NGINX with RTMP modules. No configuring Wowza. No ffmpeg command-line gymnastics.
I didn’t touch the backend. Not a single new route, handler, or database update. Everything worked with the system I already had.
I didn’t manage storage or transcoding.
FastPix handled the ingest, format conversion, segmenting, and adaptive bitrate, automatically.
And I didn’t waste time making sure the stream played back smoothly on iOS, Android, or browsers. The HLS URL worked out of the box. Bitrate switching was seamless. I didn’t even think about it until I realized I hadn’t needed to.
What would normally take days of trial and error just worked, with zero infrastructure stress on my side.
I stopped the stream and got a VOD instantly
When I hit “Stop Streaming” in OBS, I assumed I’d need to do something to save the video. I didn’t.
FastPix had already recorded the stream. A few seconds later, a new VOD asset showed up, complete with its own playback URL. No job queues, no transcoding steps, no waiting around.
It just... appeared.
There was no webhook I had to listen for, no storage bucket I had to configure, no post-processing script to trigger. The live-to-VOD flow happened automatically, and the final video was already streamable in the same player.
Honestly, I wasn’t expecting it to be that seamless. But that’s kind of the point.
This was not what I expected (in a good way)
I thought I’d spend a weekend figuring this out, reading docs, spinning up test servers, debugging video latency, all that fun stuff.
Instead, I had live video running inside my product in under 30 minutes. And most of that time went into tweaking OBS settings, not writing code.
If live video is a feature in your product, not the product this is probably the fastest, lowest-friction way to ship it.
I didn’t rebuild my stack. I didn’t hire a video team. I just used a few API calls and got back to work.
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