U.S.-Based Auction Platform Transforms Online Bidding with Real-Time Auction Streaming Solution Powered by Red5 Pro
Case Studies · Live Auctions
A leading U.S. online auction platform partnered with Red5 to modernize its bidding experience through a real-time auction streaming solution capable of sub-250ms latency, even in low-bandwidth rural environments. This case study explores how the platform integrated Red5 Pro within its own AWS infrastructure to drive greater user engagement, improve operational efficiency, and expand its remote bidder base.
Customer Overview
The customer is a well-established digital auction company serving buyers and sellers across North America. The platform hosts both live and timed online auctions across diverse categories, including vehicles, industrial machinery, construction equipment, and real estate. The company is part of a larger publicly traded auction group and has been operating in the online auction space for over two decades.
Challenge
The platform’s legacy system relied on static images, which limited the engagement of online bidding, especially for users in rural regions with poor internet connectivity. To deliver a more immersive auction experience and increase remote participation, the company needed to integrate real-time video and audio into its platform.
Key requirements included:
- Real-Time Audio and Video Delivery at Scale: Support for a large number of simultaneous viewers with sub-250ms latency.
- Ultra-Low Latency Streaming in Low-Bandwidth Environments: Reliable performance in rural areas with limited internet infrastructure.
- Full Cloud Deployment Control: Deployment within the company’s AWS account to align with internal infrastructure policies and enterprise cloud commitments.
- High Customizability: Flexibility to integrate with internal systems and tailor the experience to existing workflows.
- Monitoring Integration: Compatibility with Datadog for real-time performance tracking and alerting.
The company sought not just a vendor but a partner who could offer a scalable, AWS-compatible solution and provide deep technical collaboration throughout implementation.
Real-time Auction Streaming Solution
The deployment diagram
Red5 Pro clustering was deployed on Amazon EC2 instances. The Stream Manager, the cornerstone of Red5 Pro’s architecture, provided a comprehensive solution for managing, orchestrating, and autoscaling their streaming infrastructure depending on an auction event. The content was distributed using a one-to-many delivery model. All streams were recorded and stored in Amazon S3 buckets for on-demand playback, allowing the team to access content later.
Red5 Pro also supported Datadog integration, enabling the customer to maintain observability, monitor uptime, and troubleshoot in real time.
Throughout the implementation, Red5 collaborated closely with the platform’s technical team to guide performance optimization and provide architectural recommendations to ensure long-term scalability and customization.
Benefits and Results
Reliable real-time online auction streaming for rural areas with poor internet connectivity
By embedding Red5 Pro’s real-time video capabilities, the customer delivered a more interactive and dynamic auction experience for users across the country.
Key outcomes included:
- Up to 40% reduction in support requests: Real-time observability through Datadog allowed the platform’s DevOps team to resolve issues proactively, improving platform reliability and decreasing support load.
- Real-time video and audio streaming with sub-250ms latency: Enabled bidders to see and hear the auctioneer in near real-time, creating an experience that closely mirrors in-person auctions.
- 25% increase in remote participation: Ultra-low latency performance, even in rural areas, encouraged more users to join auctions remotely.
- Improved user engagement and auction duration: Live streaming extended bidder attention spans and increased the average session time, helping drive higher total handle and revenue.
- Lower infrastructure costs over time: Hosting the solution within their AWS environment reduced third-party dependencies and enabled cost-efficient resource scaling, lowering infrastructure spend by an estimated 20 percent.
Conclusion
With Red5 Pro’s real-time streaming architecture in place, the customer successfully modernized its auction platform. Static online listings were transformed into interactive, video-enabled events. The AWS-native deployment, combined with customizable features and robust system monitoring, delivered measurable improvements in bidder engagement, operational efficiency, and platform scalability. The company is now positioned to drive continued growth with a smarter, more immersive auction experience.
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