Room
Chat, communities and live TV in one place
A social platform that brings messaging, community spaces and live TV streaming together, built and operated by Xsphere alongside Fary.
- Sector
- Social & media
- Status
- Live, in continuous development
- What we did
- Product strategy
- UI/UX design
- Mobile apps
- Realtime infrastructure
- Streaming & delivery
The challenge
People move between a messaging app, a community feed and a streaming service to do things that belong together. Keeping them in one place means each part has to be good enough to stand on its own.
Our approach
Treat messaging, communities and live video as one product with shared identity and shared social graph, rather than three features bolted together, and build the realtime and streaming layers to carry all three.
The outcome
A live social platform combining chat, communities and live TV, developed and operated by the same in-house team that builds Fary.
Realtime as the foundation
Messaging and live video are both realtime problems, but they fail in different ways: a late message is an annoyance, a stalled stream ends the session. Room is built so that the two share infrastructure where it helps and stay isolated where one must not be able to degrade the other.
Communities with something to gather around
Community features tend to stall without a reason for people to show up. Pairing them with live TV gives Room a recurring event to build around, and gives the chat a subject.
The social graph is shared across all three surfaces, so a connection made watching a stream carries into messaging and community spaces.
A second product on the same foundations
Running Room and Fary side by side means shared engineering practice, shared operational tooling and a team that has solved mobile delivery, account systems and live operation more than once.
Work we do for clients draws on both.
Fary
Urban mobility, built in-house