AWS for M&E Blog
Whatnot bolsters real-time live stream resiliency with HAQM IVS
Community is at the heart of live shopping destinations like the wildly popular Whatnot. The online marketplace surpassed $3 billion in gross merchandise volume in 2024 and is on track to top that achievement in 2025. People from around the world converge on the platform daily to forge connections and purchase items that they love, from rare trading cards to unique coins to luxury handbags. While Whatnot supports instant purchases, its real-time auctions draw the most traffic.
To ensure the best possible video experience for its customers during auctions, Whatnot has prioritized real-time latency from day one. Scalability has also become increasingly important as its user base expands globally. By integrating HAQM Interactive Video Service (HAQM IVS) Real-Time Streaming into its platform, Whatnot supports those goals as the platform and its users’ needs evolve. HAQM IVS is a managed live streaming video service from HAQM Web Services (AWS) built on webRTC and global infrastructure underpinning Twitch.
“Our latency threshold is 500 milliseconds or less; it must be imperceptible to users,” explained Laura Rothman, Whatnot Senior Manager of App Platform. “HAQM IVS more than meets that gold standard, and it just works. That’s the magic of having a really great third-party solution. We don’t worry about video infrastructure affecting our business and let our other growth levers sing.”
Supporting scale through redundancy
Founded in 2019, Whatnot initially served a niche customer base in the United States around collectibles like Funko Pop. As more buyers and sellers flocked to the platform and they expanded into many more categories, the Whatnot development team sought to diversify its video infrastructure, instead of relying on a sole provider. After evaluating various solutions, they determined HAQM IVS Real-Time Streaming was the best fit.
“We looked at two major factors: time to first frame and the WebRTC [Web Real-Time Communication] stack,” explained Rothman. “People are used to having video start immediately when they open an app so fast time to first frame is a must, as is a WebRTC foundation. HAQM IVS fills both those needs. While the global reach of AWS wasn’t an initial consideration, it’s become critical to our long-term business goals as we continue to expand internationally.”
Though buyers often engage with Whatnot on mobile devices, many of its sellers broadcast using Open Broadcast Software (OBS) Studio open-source video recording and live streaming software running on a laptop or PC. Native support for OBS Studio, including the WebRTC-HTTP ingestion protocol (WHIP), was another driving factor in the team’s decision to go with HAQM IVS.
Creating a unified platform
Whatnot built its core backend stack in Python and its auction and chat experience in Elixir Erlang, both on top of AWS, with the Datadog pipeline for logging. During live streams, buyers can bid on items or purchase them directly, send gifts or tips to sellers or users, and interact with one another through chat. While Whatnot utilizes multiple managed live video services, they have unified these systems to deliver a seamless experience to users. For example, leveraging multiple streaming vendors enables Whatnot to dynamically select the service based on stability, features and stream size, ensuring consistent reliability and the highest-quality viewing experience. Additionally, the platform captures and automatically archives each live session into an on-demand video (VOD), stored using HAQM S3. This live-to-VOD pipeline is essential for transparency and buyer trust, allowing users to verify their purchases after an auction ends, and assisting internal teams in maintaining platform safety and compliance.
As early adopters of HAQM IVS Real-Time Streaming, Whatnot worked closely with AWS to refine the feature set. Rothman noted, “Our experience with the amazing HAQM IVS support team has been deeply collaborative. They take care of us and ensure no stone goes unturned, so that we grow together and have a stable video infrastructure that can handle large influxes of viewers in seconds.”
Along with HAQM IVS, Whatnot uses HAQM Simple Storage Service (HAQM S3) buckets to store video recordings of each live stream, which provides an added layer of transparency for both the buyer and the seller.
Sustaining growth
In Rothman’s view, the reliability of AWS is vital. She explained, “There are different ways of thinking about infrastructure, and we want ours to work like a utility company. When you turn on your kitchen faucet, you know that water is going to come out in a predictable way. We get that type of reassurance with AWS and HAQM IVS, along with core observability metrics that indicate success—low latency, optimized bit rate, and reduced packet loss.”
As Whatnot continues to rapidly expand its platform, Rothman and her team are planning new features to further improve the experience. They’re considering adding capabilities such as transcription or translation, and more compressive connectivity tooling.
Rothman concluded, “The success of Whatnot can be attributed to a few things, but the foundation is that core user experience. We want to provide a platform that fosters community and allows people to positively interact and transact. Our rapid growth is very much a reflection of our commitment to that, as well as our choice of vendors, like AWS. They share that same expectation of excellence and offer technology that can grow with us.”
Learn more about scalable video live streaming, or get in touch with an AWS for Media & Entertainment representative.
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