Build a Live Event
What you'll build
A scalable one-to-many live event — a webinar, concert, sports broadcast, or product launch. One broadcaster (or one RTMP encoder) sends video into Native Frame, and many viewers watch it live. You can optionally ingest from a hardware or software encoder for a polished production, record the event for on-demand replay, and embed the player directly on your marketing or event page.
This is a solution recipe: it routes you through the existing task guides in the right order rather than repeating their code. Follow the links in each step for the canonical, copy-ready instructions.
Architecture at a glance
- Source — a browser broadcaster or an RTMP encoder (OBS, hardware unit) captures the event.
- Ingest — the source pushes into Native Frame, authenticated with a token.
- Distribution — Native Frame delivers the stream to viewers over WebRTC for low latency or HLS for large-audience scale.
- Viewers — audience watches in your app or on an embedded web player.
Tokens gate every connection (broadcaster and viewers), and recording taps the ingested stream so a replay is ready when the event ends.
For a big, passive audience you'll usually lean on HLS for reach; for a small interactive event you'll lean on WebRTC for latency. See Scale & latency notes below.
Build it
-
Get credentials and tokens. Every broadcaster and viewer connection is authenticated. Start here so the rest of the steps have working access. See Set up tokens.
-
Choose your ingest. Pick one, based on how produced the event needs to be:
- Broadcast from the browser — fastest path for a single presenter with a webcam. See Set up a livestream video.
- Ingest from OBS / RTMP — for professional events with a switcher, overlays, or hardware encoders. See Stream with OBS and RTMP push.
-
Let viewers watch. Wire up the player so your audience can join the live stream. See View a stream.
-
Record for replay (optional). Capture the event so it's available on demand once you're off air. See Recording.
-
Embed on your page (optional). Drop the player onto your marketing or event landing page so viewers watch without leaving your site. See Embed the web player.
Set up recording before you go live — you can't capture an event retroactively.
Scale & latency notes
The core tradeoff for a live event is latency vs. reach:
- WebRTC gives sub-second latency, ideal when the audience interacts in near-real time, but is more expensive to fan out to very large crowds.
- HLS scales cleanly to huge audiences via CDN caching at the cost of higher latency (seconds).
Match the protocol to the event: an interactive Q&A leans WebRTC, a stadium-scale broadcast leans HLS. See Streaming protocols for the full comparison.