With the news outlets predicting the second wave of the pandemic, our tech support is being flooded with requests to develop systems for webinar hosting. A webinar almost always involves sharing the host’s desctop screen, and developers are often faced with questions on how to realize it. Questions on selection of servers and virtual instances are just as frequent. Not to mention, the most important question of them all – how to protect the streaming data from unauthorized access.

We compiled all the answers into a single article, and here it is.

We had 300 subscribers, three Edge servers, one Origin server, a whole galaxy of multicolored browsers and a stream with a 480р resolution. Also, a task to develop a system for webinar hosting. And we needed to do all that, because once you get locked into streaming via WebRTC with low latency, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only question remaining concerned the selection of the cloud platform for server hosting. For there is no one more dejected, upset and angry than viewers watching a steam riddled with artifacts and freezes.

For viewers to be satisfied, video broadcasts should have the lowest possible latency. Therefore, your task as a developer of any product related to video broadcasts — be it a webinar system, online training or online auction — is to ensure low latency. In case of using CDNs, low latency is ensured by using WebRTC to transfer a video stream from Origin to Edge, which, in turn, allows connecting a large number of viewers. But, if you constantly keep on a certain number of servers in the expectation of a large influx of viewers, then the money for renting servers will be wasted while there is no influx. The best option would be to launch additional Edge when the flow of viewers increases and turn them off when it decreases.

In our blog, we have mentioned the practical application of CDN many times already. This includes broadcasts of auctions, horse races and sports events. As well as broadcasts of webinars, master classes and online lessons.

Indeed, the need for low-latency WebRTC video broadcasts is already well established in our lives. We propose to consider another option for deploying CDN with Elastic Load Balancing and auto scaling in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment.

We have been staying at home for quite a long time now. In this situation, communication between people is coming to the fore. We need to call each other and communicate somehow. For some people, it is entertainment as they are missing their loved ones, while for others it is associated with business.

On one of those languid evenings, I had a phone call from a friend who opened a school for teaching programming to children and teenagers long before all the quarantine-related events. Of course, the circumstances made him move his classes to online.

I was once preparing yet another virtualization software to install Web Call Server on it and clone it several times for further deployment of a test CDN. It ocurred to me that it would be perfect if the process was self-deploying and did not require my participation.

In the modern world, there are many various IP video surveillance cameras, which are very different: from those that operate in the DVR mode to those that can conduct online broadcasts in real or near real time. Such broadcasts can be posted on the website to attract customers, and this can be useful not only for bloggers and companies working in the field close to IT.

Alice is an experienced full stack developer, who is capable of writing a SAAS project framework on her favorite framework using php in a week. As for frontend, she prefers Vue.js. 

A client contacts you via Telegram, asking you to develop website that will be the meeting place for the employer and the employee to conduct an in-person interview. In-person means face-to-face, a direct video contact in real time with video and voice. “Why not use Skype?” some may ask. It just so happened that serious projects – and each startup undoubtedly considers itself a serious project – are trying to offer an internal communications service for a variety of reasons, including:

Today, the words “virtual reality” will not surprise anyone. Futuristic equipment, which we could only see in science fiction movies a couple of dozen years ago, is now available to regular users. Even those who cannot afford proper equipment can build a VR headset of available materials following a variety of DIY-tips with YouTube.

“Oh no, this HLS is killing me!” Igor said and poured some hot tea in a mug with thick walls. “Customers complain again about freezes, and we only made another release with corrections yesterday.”