Kumu is a dynamic and powerful live-streaming entertainment platform designed for GenZ and Millennial Filipinos. The platform empowers over 1 million Filipino content creators worldwide to connect, engage, and share content. Along with real-time interaction, messaging, and gaming features, it provides earning opportunities to live streamers. Besides, it is a convenient marketplace for e-commerce businesses to elevate, redefine, and promote their brand and boost sales. The platform also encourages communities to ignite discussions popular among Filipinos.

Quick and seamless deployment of a short video app was one of Kumu’s major requirements to serve its users in the Philippines. To develop the application, it required a Software Development Kit (SDK), a full suite of software modules, libraries, code samples, relevant documentation, and guides. Building an SDK is daunting, expensive, and time-consuming. It requires various development resources, an expert team to create, deploy, and maintain SDK.

Therefore, to develop and deploy its short video app, Kumu was looking for a video SDK that champions the following criteria:
● Easy-to-use: Provides simple interfaces and customizable UI to suit the business requirements.
● Scalable: It must be flexible enough to allow applications to scale without any hassles.
● Cost-effective: Minimizes the cost of application development, maintenance, and deployment.
● Local Support: Significant presence in the Philippines was essential to overcome local support and backup concerns.

Kumu was looking for a video SDK with local support in the Philippines. With 63 zones located across 21 regions globally and a strong presence in Southeast Asia, Alibaba Cloud was the perfect choice for Kumu. Alibaba Cloud’s digital media and entertainment experience, scalable app management capabilities, and innovative initiatives helped Kumu accelerate the development, deployment, and management of its short video application cost-effectively. Also, Kumu received 24*7 real-time local support from Alibaba Cloud's highly responsive, professional, and dedicated support team that helped Kumu easily customize the SDK to fit its specific business requirements.

Kumu leveraged Alibaba Cloud Live Streaming solutions to develop its short video app. Alibaba Cloud Short Video SDK, part of the live streaming solutions, provides easy-to-use, stable, and unified interfaces for recording, importing, cropping, and editing short videos, facilitating customized secondary development. The SDK helped Kumu quickly add short video features to the application, thereby saving the investment required to develop the video app features in-house.

With Alibaba Cloud Short Video SDK, Kumu got access to the highly open and easy to use interfaces that allow easy user interface (UI) customization to match varied business requirements. The SDK also supports a set of comprehensive features including resumable recording, real-time filters, animated stickers, subtitles, music, and beautification effects that helped Kumu add additional functionality to its application. Moreover, the Alibaba Cloud SDK is stable, reliable, and commercially verified in more than 1,000 applications, such as DingTalk, Meet, Thunder, Meipian, and many more.

Partnering with Alibaba Cloud helped Kumu in the successful development and deployment of the short video application. The app currently ranks third in the Philippines. The partnership brought innovation and efficiency to Kumu. Hence, now it plans to migrate various cloud services, including Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Content Delivery Network (CDN), Relational Database Service (RDS), and more, currently running on other cloud platforms, to Alibaba Cloud.