Twitch-Style Live Streaming Platform with EU/GDPR Compliance
We designed and delivered a full consumer live streaming platform from scratch - supporting 10,000+ simultaneous live streams and 100,000+ concurrent viewers with sub-second latency, a 95% reduction in streaming infrastructure costs, and full EU data residency with GDPR compliance built into the architecture.
The Challenge
An early-stage startup needed a Twitch-style live streaming platform for the European market- where hosts and viewers engage in real-time 1:1 discussions at scale. Building a consumer live streaming platform is hard. Building one that's performant, cost-efficient, and EU-compliant from the ground up is a different problem entirely.
- 10,000+ simultaneous live streams without performance degradation
- 100,000+ concurrent viewers with sub-second latency
- Infrastructure economics that made the product viable as a business
- Full EU data residency required from day one
- GDPR compliance built into the architecture - not bolted on afterward
- Consumer-grade experience expected of a best-in-class B2C product
The Solution
We designed and delivered the full platform from scratch - media stack, interactive overlays, consumer UI, and EU-compliant infrastructure - rethinking the conventional approach to viewer interactivity to achieve economics that work at scale.
WebRTC at scale
- WebRTC media stack engineered for sub-second latency across 10k+ concurrent live streams
- Adaptive bitrate, connection recovery, and quality fallback built for consumer reliability
- Full consumer UI for desktop and mobile - pixel-perfect, production-grade
Interactive overlay architecture
- Rethought how viewer interactivity is delivered - decoupled from the media transport layer
- The architectural decision that drove the 95% infrastructure cost reduction
- Designed to survive contact with 100k concurrent viewers economically
EU-compliant from launch
- Full data residency within the EU - no cross-border data transfers
- GDPR compliance built into the data architecture, not patched in afterward
- Operates in regulated European markets from day one
The 95% cost reduction wasn't an optimization.
It was a rethink.
The conventional approach to viewer interactivity assumes the media transport layer carries it - at 100,000 concurrent viewers, the math stops working. Most architectures hit an economic ceiling long before that scale. We designed an alternative that separates interactivity from the media layer entirely, achieving the same real-time experience at a fraction of the infrastructure cost. That's the difference between a product that can launch as a startup and one that can't.
The Outcome
The platform launched and is serving real users - with the scale, reliability, and cost model needed for a startup to build a sustainable business in the European live streaming market.
Novel interactivity architecture made the unit economics viable for a startup
WebRTC media stack built to scale without performance degradation
Sub-second latency maintained at full load
Production-grade reliability with full EU data residency and GDPR compliance from launch