ConveneAGM: Saving 50 Man-Days of Labor Per Month With Wowza

 

How ConveneAGM Maximized Its Online Streaming Performance 

 

ConveneAGM, a subsidiary of Azeus, leverages live streaming to facilitate virtual and hybrid annual general meetings around the world. These high stakes meetings are essential for any large-scale organization. As such, the technology behind them needs to replicate an experience as close to real life as possible, so ConveneAGM turned to Wowza Video to help ensure its customers’ AGMs happen smoothly and efficiently.  

     

Case Study Snapshot

Challenges:	Solutions:	Outcomes:
Experimented with multiple other streaming solutions, including building its own server architecture, that proved costly and laborious. Needed a platform that could handle two-way interactive live streaming with thousands of participants and sudden increases in viewership. Required ultra-low latency to facilitate voting processes where timeliness is imperative.	Wowza Video, an integrated platform for building video-enabled products and services.   Wowza Streaming Cloud, now Wowza Video.   Real-Time Streaming at Scale, a scalable and sub-second latency video solution for streaming up to one million viewers with WebRTC.	ConveneAGM saves an approximate average of 50 man-days of labor per month using Wowza instead of maintaining its own server architecture. Avoids 2-3 critical issues per month that were common with other providers. ConveneAGM has since facilitated over 100 annual general meetings with improved reliability and sub-second latency.

   

Facilitating Business-Critical Meetings 

Annual general meetings are a big deal because they present an opportunity for board members, shareholders, scrutineers, registrars, and other relevant parties to gather and vote on company-defining matters. These meetings can happen virtually in today’s digital world, but unlike typical corporate meetings that only need one-to-many communication platforms, AGMs require a special solution that streamlines processes like voting, account registration, accessing documents, and exporting data.  

That’s where ConveneAGM comes in. Its specialized platform facilitates everything AGMs need to be successful, from pre-meeting preparation to post-meeting analytics. An essential component of ConveneAGM’s solution is live streaming: as the chairperson and other board members present, attendees can watch the proceedings in real-time and take advantage of two-way communication to share their opinions.  

ConveneAGM experimented with multiple video providers to power its streaming needs, including building its own server architecture that could support real-time video broadcasting. However, doing so required a significant amount of resources and manual labor to scale the stream according to viewership demands. Some of the other providers the company tested, such as MUX, enabled it to stream via HLS and re-stream content, but couldn’t reduce latency enough to be as fast as its customers needed.  

Needing a more convenient and robust solution, ConveneAGM turned to Wowza to support its core product’s streaming features. ConveneAGM has since facilitated over 100 annual general meetings for various clients across industries, saving an approximate average of 50 man-days of labor per month compared to maintaining its own server architecture while avoiding two to three critical production issues per month that were common with other video providers.  

 

 

Imitating Real-Time With Half-Second Latency 

The ability to stream in real-time is a particular strength that drew ConveneAGM to Wowza’s Streaming Cloud — now Wowza Video — and Real-Time Streaming at Scale products. Combined with the former, Real-Time Streaming at Scale enables users to overcome traditional limitations of the WebRTC protocol (the fastest one out there) and stream to up to a million viewers at once with sub-second latency.  

“Real-time streaming was necessary for our use case because some stakeholder meetings require time-sensitive voting processes. For example, sections of the meeting may require resolutions to be voted upon by all stakeholders within an allotted minute, after which voting will be closed. It is important that as little delay as possible will be introduced in the timing of these proceedings; otherwise, stakeholders’ votes may not be considered,” says Arvin Bonganay, software developer at ConveneAGM.  

Real-time video is also critical for other AGM use cases, such as when proceedings involve two-way communication between stakeholder panels and other participants. Some AGMs can even reach up to 6,000 attendees, meaning speed and scalability were both essential to ConveneAGM’s goals.  

Then there’s the benefit of saved labor. Bonganay says that using Wowza to support WebRTC streaming removes the cost and effort of maintaining the company’s own server architecture, allowing the team to focus on the core functionality of ConveneAGM’s product because they can rely on Wowza to deliver the video content. Plus, the team was easily able to integrate Wowza into their system with well-documented APIs and SDKs.   

 

 

Operating With Secure Reliability 

Besides speed and scalability, ConveneAGM was also concerned about reliability. Do-overs aren’t possible because stakeholder meetings happen on specific dates and times. Glitches and buffering can have severe consequences, which is why ConveneAGM is at ease knowing it can rely on Wowza’s global video CDN and uptime capabilities to ensure proceedings go as smoothly as possible.  

Bonganay elaborates, “What set Wowza apart from similar service providers we looked at is the robust system monitoring it gives us access to. In rare events when server issues arise, the monitoring tools have given us valuable help to trace clearly where system failures may have occurred, enabling us to take swift corrective actions.”  

With Wowza, ConveneAGM found a reliable service provider that can support the demands of stakeholders around the globe. The company only needs to provide its own ingress stream and Wowza Video takes care of broadcasting the content in both HLS and WebRTC formats.  

“We’d definitely recommend Wowza to other organizations,” Bonganay says. With Wowza integrated, ConveneAGM removes awkward silences during important Q&A sessions and ensures electronic voting is as close to real-time as technically possible, making annual general meetings for high-profile companies as effective and streamlined as possible.