AFFY Connect Whitepaper

AFFY Connect is a browser-native, real-time audio streaming platform purpose-built for live in-person venues. It enables any venue — from a concert hall to a house of worship — to stream their live audio directly to attendees' personal earphones through a standard web browser, with no application download required.

The platform serves two primary user groups: Venue Operators who broadcast audio and manage their event configuration, and Guests who receive and listen to the audio stream by simply scanning a QR code.

AFFY Connect is delivered as a multi-tenant SaaS platform with tiered subscription plans, supporting single-stream, multi-room, and fully self-managed enterprise configurations.

Live venue audio accessibility is a persistent, unsolved problem across a wide range of event categories:

• 1Concerts and live music events where ambient crowd noise overwhelms the speaker system for those further from the stage.
• 2Conferences and seminars where hearing impaired attendees, late arrivals, or overflow rooms miss critical content.
• 3Houses of worship where aging or acoustically challenged spaces create inconsistent listening experiences.
• 4Sporting events where commentary is drowned out by crowd noise.
• 5Weddings and ceremonies where outdoor or large-venue acoustics produce uneven sound distribution.

Existing solutions — FM transmitter loops, induction loops, dedicated app-based systems — require expensive hardware, proprietary equipment, and significant setup time. They are inaccessible for the average small-to-mid venue.

AFFY Connect delivers real-time audio streaming through three core innovations:

AFFY Connect is built on a modern, cloud-native architecture optimized for low-latency audio delivery at scale:

Key Technologies:

• WebRTC — Industry standard for real-time browser-to-browser communication. Sub-500ms latency.
• SFU Architecture — A Selective Forwarding Unit relays the broadcaster's stream to all listeners without requiring peer-to-peer connections between every participant. This enables unlimited listener scaling.
• TURN/STUN Servers — Ensure connectivity for guests behind firewalls or NAT.
• Adaptive Bitrate — Audio bitrate adjusts dynamically based on the listener's network conditions.
• Edge CDN — Media server nodes deployed globally to minimize geographic latency.

AFFY Connect implements security-by-default across all layers:

• End-to-End Encryption: All audio streams are encrypted via DTLS-SRTP, the standard WebRTC encryption protocol.
• Unique Room Codes: Each venue session has a cryptographically unique room code. Guessing or brute-forcing codes is computationally infeasible.
• No Guest Data Collection: Guests who join via QR code are not required to create accounts or provide personal information. No audio is recorded without explicit venue consent.
• Tenant Isolation: Multi-tenant architecture ensures complete data isolation between venue accounts.
• GDPR/CCPA Compliant: Platform is designed for compliance with major data protection regulations from the ground up.

The SFU architecture decouples broadcaster capacity from listener count. A single venue broadcast can serve unlimited simultaneous listeners by adding SFU relay capacity horizontally — a seamless cloud-managed process.

The addressable market for live event audio accessibility spans:

• Live Events & Concerts: 32M+ live events annually in North America alone.
• Houses of Worship: 380,000+ congregations in the US, many with audio accessibility challenges.
• Corporate Conferences: $1.5T global events industry.
• Accessibility Compliance: ADA and equivalent legislation creates institutional demand for accessible audio solutions.

AFFY Connect's zero-hardware, browser-based approach creates a massive distribution advantage over legacy systems that require $5,000-$50,000+ in equipment procurement and installation.