When a stream stalls at the best part, users don’t check their wifi and they don’t file a bug report. They one-star your app and open a competitor’s. A streaming app has a higher bar: playback that starts before the thumb leaves the screen and holds up on a train, with the audio still alive when the phone locks.
Real-time video is the hardest playback problem there is. Latency, device fragmentation, and audio routing all bite at once, and there’s no buffer to hide behind. In 2021, Zoom brought us in to help build the React Native SDK that lets developers drop Zoom video into their own apps, along with the docs and example apps developers start from. Zoom announced it at Zoomtopia that fall.
We’d been shipping video apps long before that. We built BlueJeans’ video-conferencing client for Windows in React Native, backporting the framework to Windows 7 so their enterprise customers could run it. And back in 2016 we ported Fandor’s indie-film streaming app from native Android to React Native. Their CTO’s words, not ours:
“We really appreciate all the help Infinite Red provided to us when building our app: mentoring, building features, and fixing hard to find bugs. They were always available, always professional, and a real pleasure.”
— Dan Aronson, CTO of Fandor
There are bigger names on the client list too; those pesky NDAs keep them off this page.
Chat with our team over ZoomWe build on React Native’s New Architecture and Expo. One codebase ships to iPhone and Android, and a player fix reaches both at once.
We’re a team of about 30, fully remote across the U.S., and an official Expo partner. We maintain Ignite and Reactotron, open-source tools your React Native engineers probably already run, and we host Chain React, the React Native conference. Senior people in your own time zone: a question gets answered today, not overnight. We know media launch dates don’t move: when the app is pinned to a premiere, it ships.
Have you actually built video and streaming apps? Yes. We helped Zoom build its React Native Video SDK, and we’d shipped streaming apps for years before that: Fandor’s native-Android-to-React-Native port among them.
Can React Native handle video the way a native app does? Yes. The player is native: ExoPlayer on Android, AVPlayer on iOS. React Native drives the interface around it, and the video frames never touch JavaScript. SoundCloud built its creator app this way and reported 85% code reuse. Bloomberg built its consumer app in React Native too, and cut its dev time roughly in half.
Can you add live video, not just playback? Yes. Live is where our video work started: we helped Zoom build its React Native Video SDK. For live streaming we build on WebRTC and services like Amazon IVS, Mux, and LiveKit, or the HLS pipeline your team already runs. We connect to what you’ve built; we don’t make you rebuild it.
What about DRM and content protection? FairPlay on iOS and Widevine on Android, through the native players, license servers and offline downloads included. We don’t build DRM systems; we integrate the ones the studios already trust.
Do you build for TV? Sometimes. React Native runs on Apple TV and Android TV, and Amazon’s newest Fire TV OS is built around it. We build mobile apps designed to extend to the big screen. If your whole roadmap is Tizen and webOS smart-TV apps, we’ll tell you straight: that’s not our lane.
Can you rebuild or take over our existing native app? Yes. We rewrite one screen at a time, on your release schedule, while you keep shipping. That’s how Fandor’s Android app got to React Native.
Chat with our team over Zoom — one of our owners will meet you and talk through where your product is, what’s slowing the build, and whether we’re the right team to ship it. Fully remote across the U.S.
There's no perfect time to get started. Whether you have a formal proposal or a few napkin sketches, we're always happy to chat about your project at any stage of the process.
One of our owners will meet with you on Zoom to answer all your questions. Will it be Todd? Jamon? Gant? Email us and roll the dice!
