[kkllkkllkk]

Cool concept. I think my none gamer colleagues would be put off by the game-like interface though. Maybe just drag and droppable icons would work just as well.

That server cost seems very high, the same offering (2 vcpu, 4GB RAM) is €5.58/month at Hetzner for example.

[moron4hire]

You can build whatever interaction system you want on top of the thing. Calla is a wrapper around Jitsi to add the spatialization and communicate user state between users.

https://github.com/capnmidnight/Calla/blob/master/Calla/doc/...

As for the server costs, I'm not going to use anything other than Azure. Most of the cost is bandwidth, but it's worth more to me to keep everything in one place and not have to worry about learning another PaaS system. From the other offerings I've seen, Azure is usually only more expensive at the most lowest of tiers. Once you start scaling up, the other vendors get just as expensive. So I'm fine with shelling out a few more bucks here and there to avoid having to use something else.

[slykar]

He better hopes no one will start using it. The biggest cost factor is the bandwidth. 30 people can easily generate a steady 100 Mbps usage. A conference for 15 people is about $3/h on any cloud provider

[bigiain]

I know the Jitsi project rejected using p2p webrtc for more than 2 participants a while back due to exploding upload bandwidth requirements at the clients, but I wonder if this video-game style interface would work OK with a single low bandwidth video stream of each participant (instead of switchable low/med/hi res ones), and maybe support 5 or 6 users over P2P instead of needing that server-side bandwidth?

[sathorn]

Well, I built exactly that thing at cyberparty.io!

The video is 320x240 and one stream is about 600 kbit/s and audio is another 30 kbit/s.

So yeah, that works fine for a few users that have maybe 5 mbit/s upstream.

[sathorn]

True, video chat is very expensive especially with the extreme bandwidth costs of the big cloud providers.

I built something similar as OP and chose a mesh solution for this reason even though it's inferior.

It appears that only big video chat companies like Zoom or Skype can afford to have a generous free tier, subsidized by their business offerings.

[dannyw]

They build their own DCs, and use cloud as a peak-smoother.

No one doing serious amounts of bandwidth pay outrageous big cloud prices. See: netflix.

[m0zg]

My home internet is 200Mbps symmetric, and this is not uncommon in my area. I could upgrade to 1Gbps, for about $20/mo more. Bandwidth in the cloud is highway robbery. Bandwidth to home is flat rate.

[Franciscouzo]

It is until you read the terms and conditions and see that you have a 1TB data cap, or a more generic: we'll cut your access if you have "excessive" data usage.

[m0zg]

I don't have a data cap though. In fact I specifically picked a provider without a data cap (out of the 2 available at my location). My understanding is data caps are more popular in e.g. Canada and Australia and such, and are hardly a thing anywhere else. At least not to the point where they'd be enforced.

[dwild]

Once everyone using your provider start filling up their connection, it won't be long until they implement one.

What you got is a 200Mbps connection to your provider (and still that's probably a lie, it's probably shared before reaching their endpoint), afterward it's fully shared with every other customer... that's just how the internet is made, you can't have a dedicated 1 gbps to every single server, that just doesn't make sense.

Thing is, the higher the requirements, the more expensive it is to support, that's simple math... If you got 10 000 clients that download 1 gbps, you need 10 tbps, it's even worse if they are all on the same service, that connection won't support this, believe me.

[foobarbecue]

ISPs in the USA have been sneakily adding them for years. It's almost standard now.

[Aeolun]

My contract contains a few terabytes of data transfer. I sincerely doubt you’d get through that any time soon.