Pop Culture Live
A live, real-money trivia game show hosted by Kevin Jonas, built from scratch to handle huge spikes of concurrent players.
The brief
Every player had to see the same question at the same moment, over a live video stream, with real money on the line. That meant low latency, tight synchronization, and an architecture that wouldn't fall over when an audience arrived all at once.
What we built
- Architected, built and maintained the Pop Culture Live iOS app
- Tuned adaptive streams for the lowest latency and highest quality at sensible cost
- Built an in-app solution that kept the stream synchronized for every player
- Delivered questions securely inside encrypted HLS (m3u8) metadata, cutting server calls and cost
- Integrated server-side ad insertion with DFP Premium and AWS MediaTailor
- Built Mac apps that ran the show: ATEM switchers, HyperDeck recorders, and the AWS Elemental encoder for streaming, ad breaks and game data
- Integrated rewarded video and native ads, and ran push and social campaigns
- Prototyped an Apple TV version and demoed it to investors
- Multiplayer development led by Mike Pritchard
Swift · HLS · Timed metadata · AWS Elemental · AWS MediaTailor · DFP Premium · ATEM · HyperDeck
▶ Watch a full sample show on YouTube
In the press: Digiday, “Kevin Jonas has a new gig: mobile trivia host” (2018)
“CS54’s team and I worked together on multiple top-hit games for iOS and Android. Their talents really shined when they developed a live streaming gameshow from the ground up called Pop Culture Live. The game, app, streaming, and coordinated apps worked flawlessly together. From soup to nuts, they set up the studio, the custom teleprompter apps that tied into our gameshow database, the camera and lighting, the front-end apps, and a platform that could handle hundreds of thousands of concurrent streams at a relatively low cost. Just a fantastic team.”