Creators are the lifeblood of any user-generated content (UGC) platform. One of the challenges of building out a live-streaming UGC application is giving content creators the tools they need to grow their audience. Without viewers, creators will not be motivated to create content (and without motivated creators, we won't have a platform). Once viewers find a creator that they love interacting with, they'll subscribe to that channel and look forward to tuning in whenever that creator is online. This is where things get tricky - because most viewers won't stay logged into our application open 24/7 to check to see if their favorite creator is online. To encourage them to return to our platform, we need to build a notification system to alert viewers when their favorite streams are online. Thankfully, this is something that is quite easy to build with Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS). In this post, we'll look at how to notify viewers when an Amazon IVS stream is online. EventBridge Over Troubled Streams To build this feature, we'll take advantage of the fact that Amazon IVS sends change events about the status of our streams to Amazon EventBridge. This integration can be used for many different purposes, as there are a ton of events that get published for every stream. Here's a list of just a few of the events that get published: Session Create / End Stream Start / End / Failed Recording Start / End For the full list of events, see the . documentation As you might guess, the event that we'll take advantage of is the event. Let's create a rule that will be triggered each time our stream starts. Stream Start Creating the AWS Lambda Handler Function Before we create an EventBridge Rule, we need to create an AWS Lambda Function that will be called from the rule (it must exist before the rule can be created). We'll use the newly available Node 18.x for our function. This function will be how we send notifications to subscribers when the stream goes live. In your application, you can utilize whatever method works best to send the notification. If you have a mobile app or PWA, you might want to send a push notification. Maybe your subscribers prefer email notifications? Or maybe you want to post a message to a social media feed or Discord/Slack channel. Perhaps you want to use Amazon SNS to send an SMS message to subscribers? There are tons of different options here and there are no limitations. In my case, I am using to send a push notification to my mobile device. Pushover has a nice REST-based API that is easy to use. Pushover export const handler = async(event) => { // push notification using Pushover.net const formData = new FormData(); formData.append('token', process.env.PUSHOVER_APP_TOKEN); formData.append('user', process.env.PUSHOVER_USER_TOKEN); formData.append('title', `${event.detail.channel_name} is Live!!!`); formData.append('message', 'Watch now!'); formData.append('url', 'https://recursive.codes'); const pushoverResponse = await fetch('https://api.pushover.net/1/messages.json', { method: 'POST', body: formData }); }; Creating the EventBridge Rule This rule can be created with the AWS CLI ( ), any of the AWS SDKs, or the AWS Console. For this post, we'll focus on the console. Log in to the Amazon EventBridge console, select , and click . docs EventBridge Rule Create rule On the next page, give the rule a , an optional , choose an , select , and click . Name Description Event bus Rule with an event pattern Next Select . AWS events or EventBridge partner events If you want to create a sample event for testing purposes, select , and paste in the following pattern. Enter my own { "version": "0", "id": "01234567-0123-0123-0123-012345678901", "detail-type": "IVS Stream State Change", "source": "aws.ivs", "account": "123456789012", "time": "2017-06-12T10:23:43Z", "region": "us-east-1", "resources": ["arn:aws:ivs:us-east-1:123456789012:channel/12345678-1a23-4567-a1bc-1a2b34567890"], "detail": { "event_name": "Stream Start" } } Under , select , then an of . For the , choose . Finally, under , choose . Creation method Use pattern form Event source AWS services AWS service Interactive Video Service (IVS) Event type IVS Stream Stage Change We can leave the as is, or we can limit this rule to only the event by clicking and modifying it to look like the following: Event pattern Stream Start Edit pattern { "source": ["aws.ivs"], "detail-type": ["IVS Stream State Change"], "detail": { "event_name": ["Stream Start"] } } Click to make sure that the matches the sample event from above, and then click . Test pattern Event pattern Next In the next step, under , select . Under , choose , then find and select the Lambda function that we created earlier. Target 1 AWS service Selet a target Lambda function Click , enter any desired tags, then review and create the rule. Next Going Live We're all set to test out our rule. To do so, we just need to start broadcasting to an Amazon IVS channel. Once we do, our rule will trigger, and our Lambda function will be invoked. In my case, that results in a nice push notification on my mobile device. Summary In this post, we created an AWS Lambda function to send push notifications and created an Amazon EventBridge rule to invoke that function when our Amazon IVS live stream begins. Your function will probably involve some additional logic to look up the subscribers based on the channel that is currently broadcasting, which you can do based on the ARN contained in the key in the event details. To learn more, refer to the . resources documentation
