[i-am-curious]

P2P scales quadratically, central server scales linearly. You might argue the cost is not borne by the operator but imagine what happens if Zoom was P2P. It would probably bring down the internet.

Moreover P2P would require more upload bandwidth per user from users. P2P just doesn't make sense for standard video conferencing.

[XCSme]

> central server scales linearly

Assuming that the server combines all the incoming streams into a single output stream, otherwise it still has to broadcast N-1 streams to each of the N users.

[i-am-curious]

But why would you not combine them? In fact, I can easily see people being lazy and combining just on N sized stream to reduce server overhead especially if there is compression on top.