Born out of a love for bandy, a game that’s a hybrid of football and ice hockey, StayLive started in 2013 as a hobby video streaming platform. Content streaming started to boom at the same time, creating a demand for what StayLive offers: white-label, over-the-top (OTT) streaming capability. StayLive is unique because of its ability to provide completely customizable experiences, giving content owners the tools to create their own streaming platform with easy-to-use, drag-and-drop blocks without worrying about configuration, security, subscription or payment management, or infrastructure. 

“With Netflix, HBO, Disney, and so on, streaming is the norm,” states StayLive’s Product Manager, Per Kleven. “It’s mainstream, and people are ready to pay for video content.”

StayLive needed reliable authentication for login and signup workflows to serve their growing user base. They started with a homegrown solution using JWT, but a token-based approach didn’t include enough identifying information and was not scalable. Next steps involved moving beyond simple username and password logins to centralize authentication across multiple platforms, and refocus on developing features for their core business.

Authentication That 'Doesn’t Get In the Way' of Customization

For StayLive, it was critical to identify an authentication solution that could be used across all 50+ platforms and 200,000+ users, including mobile apps. It needed to augment rather than get in the way of customization efforts. Auth0 delivered on these requirements.

“Authentication is a big thing, right? And with many pain points,” Kleven says. “We knew we needed some kind of single sign-on mechanism to work with our customers’ existing user bases. It was a big business case for us in making a decision: to be able to integrate with other authentication providers and use existing user bases so we didn’t have to move all of them to us.”

StayLive was already aware of Auth0 and its position in the developer community. Johannes Rubensson, StayLive’s CTO, explains, “We tried Auth0 for a site product, and it worked better than what we had. There are all kinds of tools, like password reset, blocking users, bot detection, that we don’t have to build ourselves. With Auth0 we have everything we need for doing those types of things. We just jump in and go.”

In addition, extensibility mattered for StayLive to fulfill the promise of customization and the ability to fit authentication into a variety of flows. “Auth0 didn't get in our way when customizing – it helped,” Kleven shares. “We can serve the login page, the signup page, and it still fits how we're thinking about customization for customers because you can include the different logos. When you log in to one of our customer sites, it feels like you're logging in to their site, and that’s what we want.”

Better Segmentation for Customer Management with Auth0 Organizations

One of the important changes StayLive introduced with Auth0 was the ability to segment the customer base, moving away from a vast database without much contextual user information about StayLive’s customers. With Auth0 Organizations, StayLive can scale up quickly to manage the complexities of everything from GDPR to creating a consumer-based market that lets any individual create their own monetized platform. 

Offloading Identity to Auth0 Saves At Least $200K Annually

Building identity from scratch on their own would have been a “guaranteed failure”, according to Kleven. “Just maintaining the authentication would require at least two full-time employees, leading to at least $200,000 saved in salary per year with Auth0,” he says. 

As a result, StayLive has been freed up to implement a number of new releases and features since adopting Auth0. For example, they built a new live chat feature that only required four lines of Auth0 code and went live quickly. They also saved at least a month in time to market on their Apple TV app because they focused solely on app building, not authentication. 

A Self-Service Future: Enabling ‘YouTube on Steroids’

StayLive plans to expand into the self-serve market, giving everyone the ability to create their own video platform, leaning heavily on Auth0 Organizations. StayLive’s goal for next year is to have 250,000 platforms and 150,000 organizations in Auth0. The longer-term vision is to handle tens of thousands of custom domains or organizations, up to 100,000 different OTT platforms. “YouTube on steroids,” Kleven says. 

“We rely on Auth0 to handle all of the authentication for us and tick all the boxes so that we don't have to think about it,” Rubensson states. “Of course we want to come back to things like OpenID that will also be a key player for us for the real enterprise OTT platforms where they have their own user base already. We’d like to use our ecosystem to solve the problem that people have so many accounts today on so many different platforms, and make it unified.”