Motionbox made their product multiplayer without making tradeoffs on data governance

Challenge

Motionbox is an online collaborative video editor that works directly in the browser. While building the product, they decided to add multiplayer features to offer collaboration and democratize the online video editing experience.

Being a bootstrapped company, it was key for Motionbox to be able to make their product multiplayer quickly without having to build a custom solution in-house. They needed a third-party service that integrated directly with their existing architecture while maintaining a non-invasive footprint.

On top of that, it was important to keep control over their data so they needed a secure and straightforward way to store multiplayer-related data on their own servers.

Solution

Motionbox uses React, so they installed the @liveblocks/react package to implement realtime collaboration without adding too many dependencies to their codebase. With the Storage block, they’re able to synchronize the document’s state between users to enable them to view and edit the same data in realtime.

Using the Liveblocks REST API endpoints, Motionbox automatically clears and saves the document's data on their own database at the end of each multiplayer session. That way, they have full control over the data and are able to offer and SDK to give developers the tools to programatically render videos outside of the Motionbox user interface.

Results

Motionbox was able to make their product multiplayer in a matter of days while still having full control over the security of the data. Motionbox multiplayer stood out for its incredible performance enabling their users to have a smooth video editing experience. With the Liveblocks multiplayer engine, Motionbox was able to generate 25% more conversions than what they had ever gotten before.

“Liveblocks is our temporary frontline data store for realtime collaboration. The persisted data is synced on our database to have full control over the security. With Liveblocks, the app is fast and really smooth. When we released Liveblocks multiplayer we got more conversions that’we ever gotten in any given week.”

Michael AubryFounder of Motionbox