How Would the World Embrace Video Collaboration if it Couldn’t Scale?

2017-03-28 by Nicholas Reid, SVP of Product Management, Vidyo

“How would the world embrace video collaboration if it couldn’t scale?”

This is a big question that Vidyo spotted early on, way back in 2005, as it set out to pioneer the next generation of video conferencing.

Video collaboration at that time was primarily used for communicating between one traditional conference room to another. Since then, the world has changed. Today, in a time when “the office” can increasingly mean “pretty much anywhere” for millions of workers, (and consumer-facing apps are turning to video to service millions of customers), building a scalable video platform presents a new set of requirements.

We are happy to share what we’ve learned over the years with developers who are interested in the next wave of video communications. At 1 PM EST on 3/29, join us for our “Building a Global Video Chat Platform for Developers” webinar, as we discuss the challenges faced and solved when building a developer platform that delivers real-time, mobile, multiparty video.

UPDATE: The webinar was recorded - watch it now.

Today’s video collaboration landscape

Today, clear and reliable video collaboration has lept out of the conference room and into our pockets, letting us hop on a video call from our smartphone or tablet while on the train, in the airport or on the road - with more or less the same audio/visual quality as a dedicated room system that enjoys a perfect ethernet connection and high bandwidth.

When hundreds of people can reliably connect face-to-face at the same time, from wherever they happen to be, this method of communicating is proving to be transformative for critical fields like healthcare, banking, government and education. This is especially true as we work to make nuisances like dropped calls, lag, grainy or blurry visuals and frozen screens a thing of the past - and stunning levels of clarity and consistency become more of the norm, from basically anywhere.

Behind the scenes

Vidyo has diligently developed patented adaptive video layering and routing technologies that have ultimately given us a reputation as the go-to enterprise-grade video service, especially among industries with tight regulations and high security demands.

For years, global enterprises have video-enabled their applications using our APIs and SDK. Now, however, the video conferencing market is shifting to embedded video - with the vision that developers should be able to easily video-enable any application on virtually any device - effectively “video-enabling the world”. When we decided to make the shift to embedded video and roll out our video API platform, Vidyo.io, we knew that our customers would continue to demand Vidyo’s specific brand of mobile, multiparty video that is highly scalable, without sacrificing its quality.

Spoiler: it’s not all plain sailing

One of the challenges today of offering high-quality video collaboration at scale, is signaling. Initially, we built our own signaling protocol. We had a very scalable platform that was ideal for our enterprise customers, which could easily scale to tens of thousands of users.

But, with Vidyo.io, we were building a global video API platform to be used to video-enable any concept or idea that application developers could think of, whether for enterprise business or consumer-facing applications. We chose MongooseIM because we needed signaling that could scale to millions of users.

Why MongooseIM was the solution for us

We found MongooseIM to be simple, flexible and reliable, and designed for this type of global Internet scale. XMPP is the battle-hardened standard, with the interoperability and classical benefits (like chat, historical chat, etc.) that we, as a uniquely enterprise-grade service, needed for an architecture that could get to 99.999% uptime.

This is how video collaboration has lept out of the conference room and into the pockets of millions of people around the world.

As we brought Vidyo.io, to market, our priorities included geo-scalable distribution, easily working through firewalls and accounting for compiled code along with native code and browser access (as WebRTC is becoming increasingly important to the video space). At the time, we evaluated all XMPP platforms. We found that Erlang was the best solution for us, and it has gone on to help us significantly on our mission to offer embedded video to the world that “just works.”

Ask me anything

I’m proud to say that today, Vidyo.io has been featured on DevOps.com, ProgrammableWeb, App Developer Magazine, Software Development Times and elsewhere. Video is now becoming ingrained in everything people do.

I’ll be speaking more in depth on the ups and downs of building a real-time, multiparty video platform with Erlang Solutions. Register for the webinar if you are interested in learning more about my experience, the technology, and to take part in the Q&A panel afterwards. You can ask me anything!

UPDATE: The webinar was recorded - watch it now.

Learn more about MongooseIM, Erlang Solutions’ high volume messaging solution.