Kickstarter Uses Vonage to Bring Real-time Community Engagement to Crowdfunding

Kickstarter is the world’s largest crowdfunding platform for creative projects. By connecting artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers and other creators with a community of backers, Kickstarter helps people find the resources and support they need to turn new ideas into a reality.

Since launching in 2009, 13 million people from every continent on earth have backed a Kickstarter project, $3.1 billion has been pledged, and 125,172 projects – from films, games, works of art or tech products – have come to life.

Introducing Kickstarter Live

Kickstarter recently introduced Kickstarter Live – a powerful new way to bring creators and backers closer together through live video. Using real-time interactive video technology, Kickstarter Live lets creators broadcast from their studio, rehearsal space, or wherever they work to an audience of potential backers who can engage with the hosts right from the live broadcast.

Creators use Kickstarter Live to broadcast everything from musical performances, cooking shows, live product demos, games tests, rehearsals for a new play or even to countdown the final seconds of their campaign.

Building the Bond Between Users with Live Video

Building trust, transparency and community engagement are key to creating a thriving platform like Kickstarter’s. To continue to enhance the experience, the team wanted to bring creators and the people supporting them even closer together – so they decided to bring them right into the same room using live video.

Kickstarter Live lets creators and backers come together and engage in real-time. Broadcasters can see their audience, invite up to four collaborators into the live stream, and backers can get a glimpse into the creative process.

Kickstarter embedded TokBox’s live video directly into its platform where backers can ask questions, chat, send selfies, select rewards, and back the project – all while tuned in and interacting with the creator. This rich, authentic community engagement brought to life by live video is delivering outstanding results. After launching, creators who had used Kickstarter Live enjoyed a 74% success rate — more than double the average at the time.

The Challenges of Building Interactive Live Video at Scale

With millions of backers around the world and thousands of simultaneous projects on the Kickstarter platform, delivering interactive broadcast live video at this level of scale comes with significant technology challenges. There’s a lot to consider, including:

• reliable quality
• mass audience sizes on mobile
• the added complexity of multi-party chat with high volume of concurrent sessions
• a seamless experience: no downloads, in-context video
• multiple hosts around the globe

Connecting the global Kickstarter community through live video with Vonage

By using Vonage’s Interactive Broadcast API, Kickstarter was able to build an experience that lets creators and their collaborators seamlessly broadcast to anyone in the world using live video – all within the Kickstarter platform.

Vonage uniquely powers, and manages, high volumes of live broadcasts and that supports multiple collaborators from anywhere in the world, so backers can truly feel connected to the creative process.

With live video running seamlessly on the Vonage platform, the Kickstarter team can focus on serving its global community of creators and bringing thousands of creative projects to life.

"Embedding Vonage’s live video technology directly into our platform has not only created a seamless, transparent experience, but added a whole deeper level of engagement amongst the Kickstarter community. We’re consistently seeing those that use Kickstarter Live to broadcast and engage with backers in real-time, experience more than double the average success rate. The complexities of building and managing a reliable, quality and scalable service on our own would have been impossible. Thanks to Vonage, we don’t ever have to think about live video, it just works."

Nick Smit, Director of Canadian Operations at Kickstarter