Challenge
Be.Live is a Facebook Live Video Solutions Partner. Their creators wanted to multistream to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, and X simultaneously - with custom overlays, chat aggregation, and post-stream clipping - without downloading OBS or buying hardware
The previous architecture couldn't hold 1080p60 across three destinations, let alone five. Upgrades dropped streams. Moderators juggled four chat windows
Discovery
The real constraint: browser-based encoding is expensive, and creators won't accept less than 1080p60. We benchmarked WebRTC + WebCodecs, CPU-only FFmpeg, and GPU-accelerated paths. Only NVIDIA NVENC on AWS g4dn instances hit the quality bar at target concurrency
What we shipped
Streaming engine
- WebRTC ingress from browser, FFmpeg transcode on ingest, NVENC-accelerated encode on AWS g4dn instances
- Simulcast to 5 platforms simultaneously at 1080p60 - tested with 12k concurrent streams at peak
- Blue-green deploys via Terraform so engine upgrades never interrupt a live broadcast
Studio UI
- Custom-brand overlay system - logos, lower thirds, animated tickers - rendered client-side
- Interactive widgets drop into the stream: Snake (commenter spotlight), Lottery Jar (giveaways), live polls
AI Comment Assistant
- Aggregates Facebook, Instagram, YouTube chat into one moderator view
- Sentiment flagging surfaces questions and spam without a human scrolling
- "Answer this on stream" queue with a hotkey to trigger a lower-third callout
Be.Live Editor
- Post-stream: clip highlights, auto-generate captions, export podcast-format MP3
- Stream → 60-second social clips → podcast in three clicks
Why this stack
Node.js for the streaming control plane because the team's domain expertise was there. FFmpeg + NVENC was the only combination that held 1080p60 at our target cost per stream. Terraform on AWS because we needed reproducible multi-region deploys - one region goes down, the other picks up without creator disruption. React for the studio UI - it's complex enough to warrant the reactivity story
Outcome
- 12k concurrent streams at peak, 99.95% uptime over a year
- 5 destinations simultaneously at full HD
- 0 outage-caused stream drops since the blue-green deploy pipeline went live
"Our creators don't want to install OBS. Aimeice built the studio-grade experience right in the browser - the same quality, none of the friction"
