Introducing Sanity Live

How do you know that a technology is truly revolutionary?

In 1995, Bill Gates appeared on the David Letterman show. They talked about Windows 95 and why Dave doesn't have a computer (because he has too many assistants). At some point, Dave asked, "What about this internet thing? do you know anything about that?" Gates proceeded to talk about how the internet allows people and brands to publish the latest information, find others who share similar interests (chat rooms!), and listen to sports broadcasts whenever they want.

Letterman made fun of these use cases, sarcastically commenting that you can do the exact same thing with radios, tape recorders, and magazines. When Letterman asked Gates to talk about what computers will do in the future, Gates talked about how they'll help us learn and work, and maybe eventually computers will be able to think (an allusion to AI).

It's remarkable how even Bill Gates didn't foresee the profound effect that the Internet would have on society.

While in its infancy, the Internet only made publishing and communication faster, by the early 2000s, it reshaped entire industries and gave rise to functionality and use cases that simply couldn't exist in the pre-internet world — like social media, cryptocurrencies, and the gig economy.

We've seen similar patterns with other technologies. Software as a Service initially only offered a cheaper and more convenient way to buy and consume software — no upfront costs, pay-as-you-go, and no lock-in. However, as SaaS matured, collaboration and integration features that couldn't exist in the pre-SaaS world emerged pretty quickly.

Thus, a technology is revolutionary when it gives rise to functionality and use cases that were impossible without it. Today, we have proof that our content-as-data architecture is a revolutionary technology.

What is Sanity Live, and how does it prove that content-as-data is a revolutionary technology?

Sanity started with a simple idea: content should be modeled around the business and not around a website or an app, and content should be treated as data. Our approach proved to work - thousands of companies, including household names like AT&T, Tata, Puma, and RBI, rely on Sanity to build and ship content-driven apps and digital experiences faster and easier. The Sanity Content Lake,APIs, and Custom Studio help businesses map, reuse, and distribute content in any way they need.

However, Sanity Live is a capability that would have been impossible to build in the pre-Sanity world. Thanks to our content-as-data architecture, we can build a content-aware CDN that only refreshes the content elements that change and does so exactly when they change. Every refresh is tagged with a Sync Tag, and our Live Content API tracks these tags, instantly syncing digital experiences with the latest CDN updates for millions of users. The result is that now everyone who knows how to use JavaScript can build live digital experiences with Sanity Live — no specialized infrastructure or tooling required.

What can you do with Sanity Live?

Aside from a few news sites, shopping platforms, and social networks, today's digital experiences are completely static and require users to hit refresh in order to see the latest content. We are seeing our customers starting to use Sanity Live to build:

• Live commerce platforms
• Blogs and social feeds
• Mobile apps (by only refreshing the content that has changed since the last time the app was opened, you can make your apps load much faster)

However, we hope that our customers will surprise us and create digital experiences that couldn't have existed before Sanity Live came along.