Company
Date Published
June 26, 2024
Author
Patricia Finlayson
Word count
1203
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

In today's digital-first business landscape, real-time communication via voice and video is crucial for immediate and impactful user engagement across industries. WebRTC is an open-source protocol that enables developers to build robust voice, video, and data-sharing solutions, but setting up a DIY WebRTC backend solution can be complex due to technical hurdles like buffering, latency, and optimizing video quality. Businesses face challenges in maintaining stable and high-bandwidth connections, as internet routing is difficult to control, and ISPs may implement traffic shaping or throttling. Agora tackles this challenge by deploying Selective Forwarding Units worldwide and using machine learning to optimize routing. The selection of a video codec requires balancing factors like video quality, compression efficiency, and compatibility, with Agora's dynamic adjustment of codecs based on CPU load and network conditions ensuring high-quality video streaming. Real-Time Communication applications rely on complex infrastructure of servers, including application servers, signaling servers, NAT traversal servers, and media servers, posing significant cost and resource challenges. Agora's managed network of servers strategically deployed worldwide minimizes distance and latency, delivering superior quality experiences.