Streamlabs
Live Streaming Service Brings New Products to Market with Backblaze B2
Streamlabs
Hours of Content Streamed/Quarter
Retention Minimum
Storage Savings
In 2019, Streamlabs sought to build on the success of their live streaming service with new products and features. After extensive market research, they set out to develop a video collaboration and sharing service branded as Oslo by Streamlabs. But the pricing models and deletion penalties of traditional diversified cloud providers made it difficult to hit their pricing targets.
When Streamlabs learned of Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, they knew they’d found a solution that would allow them to keep the product affordable for their customers. Unlike other cloud service providers that charge fees if you delete files before a set period of time, Backblaze only charges based on the files currently stored. The Backblaze B2 Native API also enabled the team to implement a special upload links feature, allowing collaborators to add files directly to a specific project.
The Streamlabs team was able to overcome the pricing and feature development challenges they faced in order to get Oslo off the whiteboard and into production. Their storage costs are as much as three times lower, they don’t charge customers for deleted files, and they provide the desired functionality that their users love. Oslo’s pricing model became feasible with Backblaze B2, making it a reality.
Founded in 2014, Streamlabs is a leading provider of live streaming tools and a brand of Logitech. Streamlabs offers dozens of features that professional live streamers use to broadcast, better engage with their fans, grow audiences, and improve monetization.
With a mission of empowering creatives, the team at Streamlabs was driven to follow up their success in live streaming by looking beyond the stream. In 2019, Ashray Urs, Head of Product at Streamlabs, and his team were in the middle of performing market research and initial design work on their next product: video editing software for the masses. And what they were learning from the market research was disconcerting. While their target audience thought it would be awesome if Streamlabs built a video editor, the market was already full of them and nearly everybody already had one, or two, or even three editing tools on hand. In addition, the list of requirements to build a video editor was daunting, especially for Urs and his small team of developers.
While video editing wasn’t a real pain point, many solo creators and small video editing teams were challenged and often overwhelmed by a key function in any project: collaboration. Many of these creators spent more time sending emails, uploading and downloading files, keeping track of versions and updates, and managing storage instead of being creative. Existing video collaboration tools were expensive, complex, and really meant for larger teams. Taking all this in, Urs and his team decided on a different road. They would build a highly affordable, yet powerful, video collaboration and sharing service. At the time, they branded it as Oslo by Streamlabs (now Streamlabs Video Editor—in the ensuing years, those video editing features did become a reality).
As the feature requirements around Oslo began to coalesce, attention turned to how Oslo would deliver on the goal to provide them at an affordable price. After all, solo YouTubers and small video teams were not known to have piles of money to spend on tools. The question became moot when they chose Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage as their storage vendor.
To start, Backblaze enabled Streamlabs to meet the pricing targets they had determined were optimal for their market. Choosing any of the other leading cloud storage vendors would have doubled or even tripled the subscription price of their new product. That would have made Oslo a non-starter for much of its target audience.
Many of the other cloud storage providers the Oslo team considered have complex or hidden terms, like charging for files you delete if you don’t keep them around long enough—30 day minimum for some vendors, 90 day minimum for others. Urs had no desire to explain to customers that they had to pay extra for deleted files, nor did he want to explain to his boss why 20% of the cloud storage costs for the Oslo service were for deleted files. With Backblaze he didn’t have to do either, as each day Oslo’s data storage charges are based on the files they currently have stored, and not for files they deleted 30, 60, or even 89 days ago.
On the features side, the Backblaze B2 Native APIs enabled Oslo to implement their special upload links feature which allows collaborators to add files directly into a specific project. As the project editor, this feature allows you to send upload links to collaborators that they can use to upload files. The links can be time-based—e.g. good for 24 hours—and password protected, if desired.
Every software project has some twists and turns as you go through the process. Oslo could have been derailed by any number of the challenges the Streamlab teams faced from market fit to pricing to functionality. But the intrepid development team led by Urs took those challenges in stride. And the pricing and flexibility offered by Backblaze B2 enabled the Streamlabs team to make Oslo a reality.
