Multi-Party Video Conference - The most demanding lockdown tool. What is in it?

The popular video conferencing app Zoom was used to hear one of the controversial cases in the High Court of Kerala last week. That was the very next day after the Union Home Ministry warned that the Zoom app should be used carefully kept in view of security breaches reported around the globe.  Being a major controversy in Kerala during the COVID time, all those who had access to the High Court video conference tried to get into court proceedings,  Zoom app showed glitches for a while.

It is true that Covid Lockdown has created an unprecedented demand for video conferencing.  As a video conferencing technology platform provider, we are also getting a lot of feature requests and new enquiries from our partners and customers, and even new products based on the technology.  People are trying out all the tools available on the internet in search of finding a suitable one for running their business.  The Ministry of Electronics and IT, Government of India, has announced the launch of an Innovation Challenge to create a video conferencing platform for India.  After all, a country with so many companies and IT resources, why doesn't India have a tool like Zoom?  Is there yet another possibility or a potential for a “Make In India” product like Zoom?  Or is it just a temporary phenomenon that is related to Covid?

Have any non-enterprise customers in India bought a paid account of any video conference service before. I mean for personal use?  If so, how many?

If you know the exact statistics of the above questions, you will understand why there is no such thing as Zoom like app from India. Hundreds of free services already exist in the domain.  Google Hang Out, Skype, Microsoft Team, Zoom, Blue Jeans, WebEx and GoToMeeting are just a few of them. Facebook announced a multi-party meeting tool as part of their social media platform too.  In general, the majority of the online meetings are limited to a maximum of four or five people and in most of those cases, they will be able to do things with the available free options.  Considering all the headaches of having large meetings online, few people had chosen the online platforms to hold such large scale meetings before.  Most of us got a feeling that why should they pay for video conferencing tool while there are free options?  This may be the reason why many companies refrain from investing in this area.

The major consumers of video conferencing in India were the government,   public sector companies or the military, till yesterday.  In the private sector, companies have mostly depended on the various paid tools available on the cloud.  Often on-premise installation is required only in the government and public sector.  With the addition of servers, endpoints and other devices, it is always a multimillion deal.  By reading this all of you are getting a feeling that why the government is spending millions of rupees on a   service that only costs a few thousands a month if we go for subscription in SAAS?  The answer lies not just in data privacy and data protection.  A more technical explanation may be needed in this regard.

 Is the video conference we see in the world all the same?  The one-word answer is no.  For example, the video conference held between the Prime Minister and the Chief Ministers of states is technically very different from what we see on the Internet.  It requires specially designed hardware and servers.   They can give you better video and performance than the tools we usually use on PCs and mobile devices.  Such video conference devices are called video endpoints.  The protocol used to send and receive video is different.  To be more specific, these devices work in the H323 and SIP protocols. In this kind of video conferencing,   the video and audio from all the participants will be made into a single video and audio by mixing them on the server   This is a bit tricky because everyone wants to have their video omitted while mixing and the person who is currently talking should be given more prominence in the mixed video. This means the video has to individually for each participant and that also should be done in real-time. Till recently all these are carried out on specially designed hardware. 

 Now the story has changed.  A few companies have made their way to real-time mixing using the software.  With the advent of servers with better computing power in the cloud, the monopoly of hardware-based mixing has been hampered.  Some of the most conservative technology managers still think that this is possible only through hardware-based mixing.  That conservatism is often demonstrated in government tenders. That is why the price of these video conferencing tenders in the public sector is still in the range of multi-millions.

The main advantage of the above model is that the optimal bandwidth usage on the customer side, whether the meeting is with one person or with 100 plus participants, the bandwidth usage will be the same on the client-side, all the burden will be on the server.  Such meetings will also have Superior Audio and Video Quality.

What about the public services available on the cloud, like zoom, skype, hangout etc? Whether they use the same technology? Such services are a bit different from the one we discussed already. They don’t follow a server-side mixing of audio and video.  The Hang Out service is purely following a peer-to-peer model.  Each participant in the meeting send video/audio to everyone in the meeting and receive video/audio from each of them separately.  In this model, there is no server in between that handles the video/audio.  One of the biggest drawbacks of this is, with the increase in the number of participants will increase the client-side bandwidth consumption.  Depending on the quality of the client-side network, three or four videos can give you a good performance.  But beyond that, the conference quality will be unpredictable.

There is another model which is slightly different.  It will have a server which forwards the video from a participant to all others, but it will not mix the videos. This model is much more efficient than the peer-to-peer model. Most of the tools which do claim that they support 100+ participants in a single conference uses this model.  

The disadvantage is that these video conferences only support mobile devices and personal computers with their app installed or on the browser. For this to support the wider spectrum of video conferencing protocols like H323 and SIP, it will be difficult. In those case, these services also move to server-side mixing mode. The server-side recording also will have its own inherent limitations.

 Are there no open source technologies?

Many open source technologies are now available for video conferencing. The question is how much production-grade software is available?  Open source is good enough for a prototype to hold conferences up to 5-6 participants.  It would not be enough to create a video conference infrastructure that can support thousands of conferences. If you know a little bit of JavaScript, you can try a tool like Hang Out or Zoom with Google's open-source project, WEBRTC and JITSI.

What is the future of Video Conferencing?

Comparing the pre-COVID and COVID time demand for our video conference technology platform learns us a lesson that Video Conferencing technology has a bright future. It may not be on the direct use case we are seeing right now. But it will get integrated on to every business platforms. It can be like telemedicine on the Health Care System, customer relationship on the banking platforms, online classrooms on educational apps etc. 

Seamless API  integration with other systems and software is one of the key areas which looks promising.  Serving the meetings on the cloud will be demanding in post COVID era especially when it is integrated tightly to other enterprise systems.