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by yolo3000 1536 days ago
Are there use cases for calls with so many participants?
4 comments

One thing to consider is if you would have One API and a few knobs to control the experience and not have to worry about the underlying protocol-, reliability-, latency- aspects to build that experience. (particularly not worry about the shenanigans around tuning RTMP, RTP, HLS, or webrtc)

There are some use-cases in every industry. * Finance/Company: earnings calls as mentioned before, all-hands meetings at companies (with several people queuing for questions and answers) * Live Events (music or talkshows) * Tutoring or education in general. * Healthcare and education -- Surgeries which are broadcast to several schools and have active collaboration from some doctors. The large-scale interaction can begin much earlier before the surgery.

People have started turning to webrtc for broadcast streaming (1->many) instead of hls/dash because of the lower glass-to-glass latency. But it has scalability problems which makes it enormously expensive comparatively. There are low-latency variants of HLS and DASH emerging now though
WebRTC is some of the lowest latency streaming you can get, so I would imagine any realtime event with a large broadcasting audience would benefit. Interactive/2-way though, that's another story.
Company earnings calls with analysts? Livestreams?