Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

I've done a lot of WebRTC work -- we currently use Google Hangouts everywhere at Stack Exchange for internal team communication, but the 15 person cap hurts some bigger all-hands calls or our weekly remote parties. I don't think the hardest part of WebRTC is transcoding or TURN servers (what Twilio seems to be offering), multiplexing is where all the complexity comes from.

It's very easy to set up a video chat interface via WebRTC small-scale, and good on Twilio for focusing on making it easier to integrate mobile clients too, but I can't wait until someone (most likely the Talky.io team seeing how their betas are going) makes it a bit easier to have large N connections (right now on Hangouts N is 15, on my own stack N is around 10).

Ideally, media servers with excellent IP connections, distributed around the world, and behind GeoDNS.

It also often means some interop capabilities (signaling and/or media interworking), since many large conference use cases include some users on traditional video (SIP or H.323), Lync/Skype For Business and/or PSTN.

Finally, session control becomes important if we get into enterprise and service provider conferencing markets.

Those reqs - especially media intensive ones - are interesting in that they are mostly not Twilio's core competency. Do they build it? Partner for it? Do they care enough about those use cases?

The answers to those questions are very interesting given Twilio's tremendous developer ecosystem.

It of course makes sense for iOS and devices that can support hardware acceleration, but device mix can change during a call. So, what happens if two iOS users start, but then they add a VP8 only device? How Twilio handles that use case will be instructive for understanding what use cases we can support with this service.

It isn't likely they are transcoding since this intro suggests a P2P architecture without distributed media servers, and we know H.264/VP8 is very expensive video transcoding - e.g. many media server vendors don't get more than one transcode per core at full HD.