Red5 Enlists PubNub to Power Real-Time Interactivity at Global Scale

Red5 integration with PubNub brings together ultra-low-latency live video and real-time data delivery in one streamlined solution for building interactive applications. In this blog, you’ll learn what this integration enables, why we chose PubNub as a technical partner, and how this combined stack helps developers deliver fast, synchronized, and scalable experiences. If you want an in-depth breakdown of how the integration works under the hood, you can also visit our capabilities overview study.

A New Step Forward for Real-Time Interactive Streaming

Our goal at Red5 has always been to give developers the tools they need to deliver real-time streaming without complexity, bottlenecks, or hidden limitations. The Red5 integration with PubNub represents a major step toward that mission, combining sub-250 ms video streaming with sub-100 ms data delivery to power chat, reactions, synchronized metadata, and other interactive features at global scale.

This blog introduces the integration at a high level, but the technical details, diagrams, comparison tables, and deeper engineering breakdowns are available in the full capabilities overview study.

Why We Built The Red5 Integration With PubNub

When we evaluated real-time data platforms, we weren’t looking for a vendor. We were looking for a world class technical partner able to match the performance, scale, and reliability of Red5 Cloud’s video infrastructure. PubNub checked every box.

PubNub offers a platform for building, managing, and optimizing real-time interactive apps, with sub-100ms latency, 99.999% reliability, and enterprise-grade security. Founded in 2010, over 2000 companies including DAZN, Live Nation, LiveLike, and Amagi rely on PubNub to deliver a comprehensive set of core building blocks to easily build live experiences that are secure, scalable, compliant, and engaging.

As part of their core promise, PubNub’s offering is proven to scale to millions of concurrent users and trillions of messages per month. Combined with Red5 Cloud’s autoscaling clusters and multi-protocol support, the integration allows developers to build highly interactive applications without managing media servers or complex data pipelines.

But the partnership extends beyond performance numbers. PubNub offers a broad engagement layer, 50 plus SDKs, in-network serverless logic, and built-in decision intelligence that automatically optimizes user experiences in real-time. All of this pairs naturally with Red5’s TrueTime Solutions, creating a unified platform for live video applications with interactivity baked in.

What This Integration Makes Possible

To understand the value of the integration, it’s useful to look at what becomes possible when real-time video and real-time data operate on the same latency budget.

Unified Real-Time Video and Data

Red5 Cloud delivers sub-250 ms glass-to-glass video using WebRTC, WHIP and WHEP, SRT, Zixi, and other streaming protocols. PubNub complements this with sub-100 ms global data delivery. Together, they create a synchronized foundation where video, chat, reactions, metadata, and events stay aligned without drift or delays.

Developers can power use cases like:

• Live shopping streams with synchronized product overlays and real-time purchases.
• Watch parties with shared reactions, chat, and multi-user controls.
• Live sports and betting experiences with real-time stats, score updates, fan engagement, and dynamic overlays.
• Telehealth applications with smooth video and synchronized clinical data.
• Online auctions with synchronized bidding, video feeds, and live results.
• Interactive gaming and collaboration tools where every millisecond matters.
• Live event production where multiple cameras, feeds, overlays, and interactive elements must stay in sync.
• Online casino and gambling platforms with live video, real-time odds, chat, and interactive UI.
• News broadcasts with synchronized video, live updates, chat, and viewer interactivity.
• Video surveillance and smart city systems where live video feeds, sensor telemetry, and alerting must coordinate in real-time.

The integration removes the typical fragmentation between video and data, giving developers a single architecture to build on.

Developer Velocity Through Pre-Built Modules

A developer builds real-time interactive and intelligent streaming applications faster using the Red5 and PubNub integration.

At Red5, we’ve spent years creating production-ready modules that solve common streaming challenges for developers. This includes multi-camera views, synchronized metadata, watch parties, and more. With PubNub added to the stack, these capabilities can now be enriched with chat, presence, notifications, real-time triggers, and decision intelligence.

By combining both infrastructures, we allow developers to start building with powerful defaults instead of reinventing the same backend logic for every project.

Global Scale Without Operational Overhead

Sports fans from around the world watch an American football game.

Both platforms focus on eliminating operational complexity. Red5 Cloud handles video routing, transcoding, protocol support, autoscaling, and infrastructure provisioning. PubNub handles global data routing, message fan-out, presence, and serverless functions.

The outcome is a fully managed solution where developers do not have to maintain media servers, chat servers, or synchronization logic. Scaling from hundreds of users to millions is handled by the platform, not by the application team.

Built-In Real-Time Optimization

PubNub Illuminate gives teams instant visibility into live inputs and trends, including user actions, message flows, engagement patterns, telemetry streams, external data feeds, and server-side events. This visibility enables real-time optimization of interactive experiences. By continuously capturing and analyzing streaming interaction data as it happens, Illuminate empowers teams to detect friction, identify anomalies, and fine-tune live experiences on the fly.

With Illuminate’s no-code decision tables, teams can define adaptive rules and automated actions without writing code, triggering dynamic UI changes, personalization logic, moderation workflows, and in-session features based on real-time conditions. Product, operations, and LiveOps teams can experiment rapidly, automate responses, and continuously iterate through an intuitive point-and-click interface.

Paired with Red5’s video pipeline, Illuminate unlocks a new class of interactive experiences: adaptive on-screen overlays, personalized reaction and engagement mechanics, and audience journeys that adjust instantly to viewer behavior, system conditions, or backend events. Together, they allow creators and operators to orchestrate richer, smarter, and more responsive interactive video experiences.

This kind of real-time optimization historically required separate third-party tools or costly custom backends. With Red5 Cloud powered by PubNub, it is now available natively within the Red5 platform, unifying data, decisioning, interactivity, and live video into one integrated solution.

Why We Chose PubNub

The PubNub logo

During our early evaluations, it became clear that reliability, global consistency, and developer-focused tooling were essential. PubNub stood out as a world class technical partner that offers not only the performance we needed, but the depth of infrastructure and long-term stability required for enterprise workloads.

Some of the key factors included:

• Predictable sub-100 ms global data delivery.
• Extensive SDK coverage spanning mobile, web, desktop, and IoT.
• Built-in serverless logic for real-time automation.
• Robust security, including role-based access and zero-trust architecture.
• Proven resilience at massive scale (including the ability to handle peak traffic spikes).
• An optimization layer designed specifically for real-time interactive experiences.

Simply put, PubNub enables the interactive capabilities on top of Red5 Cloud’s video engine. The combination is stronger than what either platform provides alone.

Conclusion

The Red5 integration with PubNub delivers a unified platform where ultra-low-latency video meets real-time interactive capabilities and intelligent decision logic. This post explains how the combined architecture works, why it matters for developers, and which use cases it unlocks at global scale.

Try This Integration Today

If you’re interested in using these capabilities for your project, check out our documentation, sign up for Red5 Cloud, and watch this Youtube tutorial to get started or contact us to schedule a consultation.