About Client

Maestro.io

Maestro is a monetization and interactive video platform that enables brands and creators to build fully branded video websites and take back control of their content, their fans, and their revenue.

In minutes, customers can get set up with live streams, video-ondemand, ticketing, subscriptions, live shopping, tipping, and more. Our easy-to-use technology powers the biggest names in music, sports, gaming, and media, including Billie Eilish, Epic Games, Microsoft, and Apple.

Inspired by what Shopify did for e-commerce brands and what Canva has done to raise the level of professional design output without any prior training or experience, Maestro is redesigning the content ecosystem to put the power and control in the hands of content owners and creators.

A Double-Win Opportunity to Grow the Customer Base

Maestro founder and CEO Ari Evans viewed the opportunity as a double win. Amazon Web Services (AWS) had approached him about integrating the Maestro streaming video platform with Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS), a managed live streaming service that allows businesses to build engaging video experiences.

With access to access to a wide range of video management tools, customers can leverage the Maestro platform to create on-demand video experiences and build branded streaming sites. Customers can also monetize videos through subscription services, ticketed events, fan clubs, and live shopping.

“Our platform complements Amazon IVS by providing no-code capabilities so non-developers can build and monetize interactive videos,” Evans says. “AWS can offer the joint solution to their customers as we can also do to our customers—the integration expands our market significantly.”

Jake Hurst, who manages business development for the Amazon IVS solution, adds, “We were hoping to have IVS become one of the video options in the Maestro platform that Maestro could offer to its customers. And we also realized the Maestro platform is a valuable service that AWS customers could also use to engage with their audiences.”

The challenge for Maestro was to integrate the two solutions. Maestro has teamed up with other streaming providers, and those providers offered the required professional services for connecting the services. In this case, Maestro would be responsible.

“Each streaming provider has a unique architecture and set of APIs,” Evans says. “We have the expertise internally to take on such a project, but we wanted to accelerate the project timeline so that Maestro and AWS could both go to market sooner with the new offering.”

Professionalism and Ability to Move Fast Set Avahi Apart

Knowing that the integration would require expertise with the AWS infrastructure environment and the Amazon IVS service, AWS referred Evans to two potential partners. Avahi was the clear choice for Maestro.

“Avahi listened carefully and came up to speed quickly on how our platform works,” says Evans. “They gave us a professional proposal that was on-target —we did not have to keep going back and forth to get the plan right. Combined with their experience in working with AWS services, this gave us confidence they could deliver the solution on time, and the value they committed to delivering matched the cost.”

Hurst also realized the value Avahi could deliver: “Avahi has experience across the breadth of our serverless products like AWS Lambda and Amazon EventBridge, which are important elements to the Maestro integration with IVS. Avahi moved quickly and was willing to handle a short-term engagement. They understood the business problem, created a statement of work, and delivered in a matter of weeks.”

A Streaming Video Solution Easy to Roll Out to Customers

The Avahi engineering team first designed the solution architecture and mapped the journey of customers—from entering the Maestro portal to consuming Amazon IVS, creating streaming videos, and then saving their videos. Avahi also set up the Maestro-IVS integration within an infrastructure-as-a-code architecture, using AWS Cloud Development Kit and TypeScript. For coding the serverless computing Amazon Lambda function, Avahi engineers used a Node.js environment.

Avahi then deployed the middleware account into Maestro’s production account and created scripts to streamline the deployment process when new customers need to be onboarded. The scripts build out the infrastructure on a customer’s AWS account, and then Maestro has a simple process to copy and paste values into the platform, so the customer is ready to go with video production.

Avahi also developed a process to extract metadata from IVS to create the logic for video tags and coded a custom function to enable customers to trim videos. Customers can preview live streams before they go live to sync the audio and the background.

“Avahi stayed on course with their initial implementation plan, and the project flowed smoothly as they did a great job in coordinating communications with AWS,” Evans says. “Being able to tap into their expertise was key because the AWS environment was new to us. We had to learn how the infrastructure as a service is assembled and how the AWS IAM system works. The engineers were diligent in working through any issues to deliver a viable solution.”

When AWS customers want to use IVS for their live-stream video workloads on the Maestro platform, they can now integrate that workload into their AWS account. Any usage of IVS for live video is then billed to that customer account, which makes it easier from a pricing perspective for customers to deploy Maestro. “The integration architecture Avahi set up made this possible,” says Hurst.

Go-to-Market Accelerated by 4X

With the Maestro-IVS integration now in place, Maestro has an extension of its go-to-market team since AWS will also promote the video solution. For Maestro customers who already use AWS services, they can quickly add IVS to their AWS account and use the integrated platform to monetize videos and engage with audiences.

“We essentially have more salespeople promoting our solution without adding headcount,” says Evans. “AWS customers are now potential customers for us —this go-to-market strategy through partners is one of the best we’ve ever implemented.”

The integration with IVS also gives Maestro another option to offer as customers ask for recommendations on which streaming service provider to use. The Maestro team advises on the strengths of each service based on customer requirements for scalability, latency, international viewership, and security. “Customers have different requirements depending on their use-cases, and we now have more flexibility in the recommendation we can make based on the parameters,” says Evans.

Evans estimates that without the collaborative effort with Avahi, the project timeline would have at least doubled and may have even quadrupled. “In every integration, there’s a learning curve of how the streaming provider’s services work,” Evans explains. “This includes the architecture, the APIs, the content delivery network, and the storage. And then, IVS sits on top of all that as a module. In this case, we were able to put all that aside and rely on Avahi to figure all of that out for us—and they did so much more quickly.”

For AWS, Avahi played a key role during the project in the development of the IVS Merge Fragmented Streams feature. Avahi and AWS worked together to automatically consolidate multiple recordings following interruptions to a broadcast input stream and to address challenges where streamers may encounter a variety of networking conditions.

Quality Streaming Video without Using Developer Resources

Looking ahead, the future is bright for Maestro-IVS integrated video platform. “All test runs have come back positive, and our confidence is high,” Evans says. “The integration provided by Avahi creates synergy because we get qualified leads through AWS, and it’s easier for AWS to close IVS deals and get customers to revenue faster because they don’t have to use developer resources. We have also further established our position as the go-to front-end for the interactivity and monetization of videos.”

Key Challenges

• Expand market base by integrating a no-code streaming video platform with Amazon IVS.
• Identify expertise with AWS environment experience to streamline the integration.
• Accelerate project timeline to go to market as quickly as possible.

Key Results

• Project completed up to 4X faster compared to relying on internal resources.
• Integrated service includes all required functions, including trimming and merging fragmented streams.
• New solution provides additional sales opportunities for both Maestro and AWS.

AWS Services

• Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS)
• Amazon DynamoDB
• AWS Lambda
• Amazon API Gateway
• Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS Secrets Manager
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Amazon EventBridge
• Amazon CloudFront
• AWS Cloud Development Kit

Third-Party Tools & Integrations

• TypeScript
• Node.js