New THEOlive features: Multi-channel, Geoblocking and Webhooks

Today we’re excited to launch not one, but three new THEOlive features. In order to make high-quality real-time streaming at scale even easier, we just released multi-channel capability, geoblocking and webhooks. 

Multi-channel 

Are you a provider who is streaming live sports, online casino games or interactive events to multiple customers concurrently? So it’s the same content, but requires for each customer a different player look & feel, restrictions on countries the content can be made available, and usage stats to be tracked separately. Let’s say you’re doing this for 10 customers. Then you’ll have to set up 10 channels please. Oh wait, not anymore! We just made your life a whole lot easier.

When creating a channel, you’ll notice that the channel page interface has undergone some changes. We’ve not just moved things around, but also added the possibility to configure aliases for your channel under the section “Playout configurations”. For each alias that you create it’s possible to change the playout configuration: colors, poster image, announcement message, logo etc. The big advantage here is that you only have to configure your ingest once, and can then share your content on multiple web pages as each alias has a different “data-THEO-live-id”, which you can find under the “Include channel on your page” tab. More info can be found in the multi-channel & geoblocking guide. 

Geoblocking

Do you only have broadcasting and distribution rights for certain countries? Or the other way around, have you agreed to geographic restrictions with your customers? Per player alias you can now easily configure the countries where viewers can watch your content in real-time. Click on the “Security” tab under “Playout configurations” and select which countries can access the playout. Consult the multi-channel & geoblocking guide for more information. 

Webhooks

You can now configure webhooks to let your application know when things happen instead of polling for status. For example, you may want to update something on your end when channel creation is complete, or when your channel starts or stops. When these events happen, we'll make a POST request to the address you give us and you can do whatever you need with it on your end. More information on webhooks can be found in our developer hub.