Is it possible to start a livestream to custom livestream service programmatically?

Zoom Apps
1

Is it possible to start a livestream via the JavaScript Zoom App SDK, or at least be able to retrieve information on whether the livestream is started or not?

I am thinking of building a Zoom App which automates a bunch of tasks which we need to do every meeting, before, during and after a meeting.

2

@daniel2, unfortunately it’s not possible to start a livestream via the Javascript Zoom App SDK if you’re talking about the RTMP live-streaming endpoint.

There are other ways to stream the real-time audio/video that may be more user friendly:

1. Build a desktop app to capture users’ computer audio

Pros:

  • One of the most cost effective solutions

Cons:

  • You need to build a separate app for Windows, Mac and Linux
  • It is especially difficult to tap into computer audio on Mac
  • App runs on users’ computer so it can slow their computer down/make computer fans go off
  • No speaker information or separate audio streams

2. Build a Zoom bot

Pros:

  • Can get the separate audio streams per participant for perfect diarization / speaker labels

Cons:

  • It is very heavy-weight as you would need to spin up multiple servers to run the Zoom client for the bot
  • Running infrastructure for Zoom bot costs more than live streaming.
  • You need to encode the raw video and audio yourself

3. Use Recall.ai

It’s a unified API that lets you send meeting bots to video conferencing platforms to capture the audio,
video and transcription in real-time.

Pros:

  • Handles spinning up the servers, and providing the real-time raw audio/transcript so all you interact with is a simple API.
  • Gets separate audio streams and speaker names
  • Works agnostic of meeting platform

Cons:

  • It’s another 3rd party service in your stack

Let me know if you have any questions!

1 Like
3

You can use our API to start a live stream and the token from the Zoom App allows you to call our API.

Please see Get Livestream Details API to check if a live stream has been started.

To start or stop a live stream you can use the Update Livestream and Update Livestream Status API

Let me know if that helps.