Live streaming API for create, join, chat, and recordings

ChefSphere live streaming APIs target product teams shipping real-time sessions inside a food or creator app: create and join streams, chat, moderation bans, session analytics, and recordings. The goal is a shippable live surface that sits beside social, media, and wallets—not a weekend WebRTC experiment you abandon after launch week. Hosts and guests need product behavior you can support, not a demo room that collapses under concurrency.

This guide is about live session lifecycle and audience interaction, not channel presence or notification delivery covered in the realtime push guide. It is also not the media assets guide for uploads and transforms, even though recordings and thumbnails often depend on media later. Keep those intents separate when you plan architecture, staffing, and prepaid token capacity for your first production release.

Hosts need a clear create path, joiners need reliable access, and operators need bans when chat turns abusive in public sessions with strangers. Analytics should answer basic product questions—who joined, how long they stayed—without exporting a warehouse on day one of your pilot. Recordings matter when creators want catch-up content or when trust reviews need a replay trail after a disputed session.

Live session access sits in a heavier token-weight band than a catalog read because realtime infrastructure is expensive to run honestly at product scale. Plan for that when you mix live with AI vision or marketplace checkout in the same release month on one prepaid balance. Unused tokens stay available for quieter weeks after a launch spike, so you are not forced into a use-it-or-lose-it panic buy.

Pair live with moderation when public chat is on by default, and pair with media when you need durable assets after the session ends for creators. Pair with wallets when tips or gifts are part of the show and money movement must respect the same trust posture as commerce. Early access onboarding is where we align which of those you need first so burn and trust controls are not surprises mid-pilot.

Authenticate each call with an X-API-Key in the Firebase-style model and burn prepaid tokens from one shared balance across nineteen modules. Packs start at $29 for 200,000 tokens; Growth at $79 for 750,000 and Scale at $149 for 2,500,000 suit concurrent sessions plus other heavy modules. Enterprise options from $300 per month exist for dedicated limits and custom weights when volume justifies the conversation.

Request access, describe whether you are cooking-show, restaurant takeover, or creator-live first, and we contact you when onboarding opens. Illustrative OpenAPI samples exist for planning shapes; production keys and environments follow once access is granted.

Decide if live is the hero feature or an engagement layer beside commerce and social, because that choice drives capacity more than any sample snippet. If live is hero, budget token weight for session access and chat-adjacent moderation early in your prepaid plan. If live is secondary, ship catalog and social first, then add sessions once retention metrics justify the burn on your ledger.

Request early access with concurrency estimates—even rough ones help more than silence when we prioritize onboarding queues for live-heavy teams. Honesty beats fake precision every time, especially when finance asks why Growth or Scale is required instead of Starter. Related guides on realtime push, moderation, and multi-module token billing help you avoid assuming live replaces push for offline users.