Overview

Live-to-VoD is a common feature used in live streaming applications, and roughly covers scenarios that convert live streams into on-demand assets. The goal is to allow users to watch the replay of a live event after it has ended. It also creates opportunities to reuse the content while a live event is still running, for example, for doing clipping and promotional highlights for social media marketing, or “latest news” snippets.

Thanks to the flexibility of the Bitmovin API, a Live-to-VoD use case is easily supported by making just a few API calls. Over the next sections, we will cover a general overview of this feature in a Bitmovin workflow, some API details to consider when implementing this in practice, and some code snippets to get started.

Live-to-VoD workflows

Customers can initiate a Live-to-VoD workflow at any point in time after the encoding either has been created, is still running or even has finished ⁽¹⁾. In this way, we can convert a live stream to VoD almost independently of the main live encoding workflow status. In practice, this workflow enables use cases where a Live to VoD conversion is needed either for a live event that is waiting to get started, being streamed or has already ended.

(1) See our encoding status API for more details about the encoding status we report.

With Bitmovin there are two options for Live-to-VoD:

1. VoD manifest generation
2. Live Recording