For our 64th episode of WebRTC Live, Arin welcomed back Lorenzo Miniero, Chairman of real-time communications experts Meetecho and Founder of the Janus WebRTC media server to discuss hybrid events, a growing and fascinating use case for WebRTC.

While the topic of the day was Meetecho’s experience and lessons learned in this journey there and back again to a more intensive hybrid meeting experience, the episode started with a nod to the upcoming 8th birthday of Janus and the coinciding release of Janus 1.0, which constitutes a considerable refactoring of the internals of Janus itself.

After a brief remote music collaboration celebration by Arin and Nimble Ape and broadcaster.vc‘s Dan Jenkins (look for it at 9:22!), Lorenzo reflected on these milestones and the improvements that Janus 1.0 will bring, including the ability to put more than one video or audio stream inside the same peer connection.

There and back again

Prior to the pandemic, real-time communication companies like Meetecho already provided limited forms of remote support to events such as the IETF meetings. Lorenzo explained how these worked in the past.

With the pandemic, they moved to completely virtual. More on how Meetecho created a scalable virtual event platform can be found in Lorenzo’s CommCon 2020 presentation.

While we are starting to meet in person again, large numbers of conference speakers and attendees will not return in person for some time, if ever.

Great hybrid events, courtesy of WebRTC!

This March’s IETF 113 will be a hybrid onsite/online meeting in Vienna, Austria. In a change from previous meetings, all participants, both onsite and remote, will need to use the Meetecho remote participation service in order to participate. Changes to make this possible include:

• The audio backend is now the Janus AudioBridge, not SIP
• Local video sources will use WebRTC, not plain RTP. This will be done on the same equipment as before: Pion + FFmpeg/GStreamer on the same Raspberry Pi. Lorenzo noted this could be done with WHIP in the future. This is a new IETF standard that is targeted on facilitating WebRTC ingestion for broadcasting.
• Additional cameras
• WebRTC screen sharing even for local slides, rather that splitting projector output
• Queue management for moderators within Meetecho application
• Remotely-controlled preloaded slides

Watch Episode #64!

WebRTC Live Episode 65 with Tsahi Levent-Levi is March 9 at 12:30pm Eastern!
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Never miss an episode of WebRTC Live, our webinar series hosted by WebRTC.ventures Founder and CEO, Arin Sime. We feature the latest use cases and technical updates to this increasingly popular coding standard for live video. Watch past episodes on our WebRTC Live page, our YouTube channel, and on our blog. Better yet, use the form in the right sidebar to join our mailing list and be among the first to know about upcoming episodes and the latest news in WebRTC!