Alibaba Cloud powers Kumu for a great live streaming experience

The popular social app embraces cloud technology to create short video services for curators and viewers to interact

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, is now powering Kumu, the dynamic and powerful livestreaming entertainment platform designed for Gen Z and millennial Filipinos. Leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s powerful, elastic and scalable cloud computing technologies, Kumu is able to build a strong infrastructure to support the application’s exponential demand growth, and provide curators and viewers with rich and smooth experiences when on the platform.

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With COVID-19 pandemic keeping most people indoors, Kumu saw the need to provide its users with short video services in order to meet their demands to socialize, interact and create business opportunities. Powered by Alibaba Cloud’s Live Streaming Solutions including a software development kit (SDK), Kumu rolled out the video service in a month with minimal infrastructure investment.

Alibaba Cloud’s SDK provides an easy-to-use, stable, and unified interface for recording, importing, cropping, and editing of short videos, facilitating customized secondary development for Kumu users to create added-value to their original content. It also supports a set of comprehensive features including resumable recording, real-time filters, animated stickers, subtitles, music, and beautification effects that helps Kumu add additional functionality to its application. SDK has been deployed in more than 1000 applications worldwide.

“Kumu values our user experience and therefore, we want to work with a trusted cloud service provider to enhance our digital offering,” said Andrew Pineda, Chief Architect, Kumu. “With Alibaba Cloud’s strong presence in APAC and it’s proven livestreaming ability powering various business scenarios such as e-commerce livestreaming during 11.11 shopping festival, we believe their expertise is sufficient to help us in building a stronger technical platform to serve our users better.”

“Developing video app features in-house can be challenging and time consuming for enterprises, so we are glad to help Kumu launch its short video service using our existing SDK structure,” said Allen Guo, General Manager for the Philippines, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “During COVID-19 we see huge demands in video services by various businesses and our customized solution can be rolled out as quickly as 7 days, which is pivotal in helping businesses to stay ahead of the customer demands to achieve success.” 

Kumu, launched in 2018 by Roland Ros and Rexy Dorado, connects Filipinos around the world by providing a platform where users can share updates about their lives and activities through livestreaming. The proud local application has more than 5 million users worldwide and ranked number one free app on the App Store in October 2020.

Alibaba Cloud is the world’s third largest public cloud service provider and the largest in APAC, according to Gartner. It operates in 22 regions with 67 availability zones to connect world businesses together. As the technology backbone supporting Alibaba Group’s various ecosystems including e-commerce, fintech, logistics, media and entertainment and digital marketing, Alibaba Cloud has developed rich product and services portfolios in bridging real operational issues with digital solutions.