InvitePeople cuts costs and latencies to deliver enhanced, realtime user interactions

InvitePeople is an events management platform used by organizations like Deutsche Bahn, Atlas Copco and Bonnier to host online webinars, conferences, and hybrid events. Events are varied, with attendee numbers ranging from a few hundred, to tens of thousands of concurrent participants across the globe.

With participant numbers and realtime requirements ramping up quickly, it became clear to InvitePeople that their long polling-based solution was limiting their ability to meet customer needs - latency was impacting user experience, they couldn’t introduce the realtime features they wanted and were struggling to deliver a reliable service as traffic demands grew.

InvitePeople needed to quickly identify a robust solution that could handle the scale and unpredictability that large events can bring - such as huge spikes in traffic and fluctuating user activity. The chosen technology also needed to be future-proof, and able to deliver realtime features that could engage both in-person and online event participants in the same way.

InvitePeople knew a WebSocket solution was the way forward and investigated the possibility of developing and managing the infrastructure and platform themselves using AWS. However, they quickly realized it wasn’t the route they wanted to take. Being a small team of developers, they needed to focus their attention on their areas of expertise - web and application development of the event systems, not the technology running it in the background. 

After discounting the option of building the solution themselves, and other competitors in the space, InvitePeople turned to Ably’s Pub/Sub Channels to power all their events.This has enabled them to enhance their chat capability, display user presence, run live polls, and add a host of other custom realtime features. 

Development and set up was quick using Ably’s SDK and APIs. Erik Gullestad CTO and Co-Founder of InvitePeople said:

“We knew that WebSockets were the right protocol to use but there is a lot of work to do if you’re going to make them work reliably and robustly in production. Using Ably’s platform meant that within a week we had a first release and just a week later the chat looked the same for the end user, but it was a lot faster and our servers were a lot calmer!”

InvitePeople is now able to ensure participants receive the best possible experience and are fully engaged in the events they attend. They believe participation should be fun and immersive, which means virtual interactions need to happen instantly, with minimal latency. Messages in a twitch-like stream are now easily managed and processed, even when there are tens of thousands of participants in different locations.

Realtime flexibility

They can now also dynamically moderate and change content for all, or a subset of, participants, with changes appearing instantaneously - no browser refresh needed. Users can be sent into new chats with interactive features or quizzes then sent back into the main event, all done seamlessly and in realtime.

Hybrid events are increasingly popular with customers and ensuring participants have the same experience in-person and online has been something that InvitePeople wanted to make a seamless process. Users can access mobile or web apps in-person, joining the same chats for on-site interactivity as those attending remotely. Ably also powers use of InvitePeople’s 3rd party integrations with services like Kahoot and Mentimeter, allowing controlled interactive add-ons to be served to participants at specific times. Participants can have a free chat between events then move into interactive sessions where add-ons are used.

Insight and feedback

Presence indicators show who is online, which specific sessions are attended and how much interaction and conversation takes place. With all the user interactions comes a wealth of statistics and data that can provide customers with powerful feedback and insight about how people are engaging with their events. Hosts can know what has worked well in realtime and get feedback on what they could do differently next time to increase engagement.

Ably batches up the data coming through and sends it using webhooks to their database. This is then used to produce statistics and, crucially, reporting back to customers on the success of their events.

Reflecting on the introduction to Ably and having used the platform for nearly 3 years now, Erik concluded, “If we look at the quality of what we deliver and how fast we deliver it, it’s so much better than we had before. We have never, ever looked back.”