LiveKit

Hey Product Hunt 👋 When the pandemic started, I worked on a side project building “Clubhouse for companies”. Like Clubhouse, I built it using Agora for the audio. Pinterest wanted to buy 500 seats, but told me for security reasons, I had to use an alternative to Agora. I started to look at open source options, and quickly realized there wasn’t a modern stack with good mobile support. I mentioned this to my longtime friend, David, and he offered to help me build an open source WebRTC stack in Go, which I could use in my side project. We didn’t realize how hard or fun it would be, and I eventually forgot all about that Pinterest deal. A little over a year ago, we launched LiveKit, a modern, open source, end-to-end WebRTC stack. It made it easy to build real-time video and audio features into browser, desktop or mobile apps. Shortly after our launch, we became the fastest growing WebRTC repo on GitHub and 100s of projects were using LiveKit. While many developers were running LiveKit in production, others found it challenging to operate their own media infrastructure or just wanted to focus on their products. We built LiveKit Cloud to make building, deploying and scaling real-time video and audio features, simple. Cloud is a WebRTC platform operated by the LiveKit team. It uses the same LiveKit open source SFU, APIs and SDKs. You can even switch between Cloud and your self-hosted stack without changing any code. What’s different about Cloud is a custom orchestration layer, allowing it to support massive scale experiences. For example, with Cloud, you could build a 5v5 version of Twitch, with all 10 players’ games streaming simultaneously to a 100,000 person virtual arena. With only 100ms of latency between anyone. What’s more is, you can build it about as easily as an app for 1:1 meetings. Cloud does the hard work for you! LiveKit Cloud has a generous monthly free tier and then a pay-as-you-go model afterwards. An incredibly detailed analytics and telemetry system is also free for all projects. David and I are excited for you to give it a whirl and look forward to your questions and feedback. Russ

We're using LiveKit since months for https://unping.com - its awesome so far. And the support is outstanding. Thanks so much guys!

We've been trialing LiveKit at Gather for a few weeks now, and are hoping to ramp up more soon. Both the team and the product are extremely impressive. Clearly has been built with a lot of love by people who really care about what they're doing. It's the ~only real-time video API that has the flexibility we want, and they've put an incredible amount of effort into making it work to the degree of reliability you need in production. Extremely cost-effective too -- pricing makes much more sense than the other API providers. Congrats on the launch Russ :)

I've been playing with the open-source LiveKit SDK for over a year and I think everyone should seriously consider LiveKit for their next or current project. Here's why I'm very excited about this new release: 1. It is hands-down the best and cleanest library for in-browser WebRTC with the best DX and UX (I've tried m.a.n.y). You can start with the pre-built UI, or use well-designed hooks to build one from scratch. And it's packed with some of the best features used by web conferencing solutions today. Even such thing as [simulcasting](https://blog.livekit.io/an-intro...), which most competitors don't even offer, is handled transparently and just works. 2. The team is super responsive and supportive on Slack, and it's been great watching them ship new features regularly, such as the RTMP encoder and broadcaster, new SDKs, documentation, and even things like complex benchmarks and tests. These guys know what they're doing. 3. The only hurdle with using LiveKit in production as a small team was managing and scaling the deployment. The new cloud service solves this completely. And what's more, the pricing is based on bandwidth, not participant minutes, and is actually cheaper than pretty much every other alternative (plus, if you ever get to a scale where you'd rather host LiveKit yourself, you can switch to a fully-featured open-source solution). And 100k participants in a room at the same time? Most other solutions can barely get you a thousand. Congrats @dsa and @davidzh on the launch!

Nice idea! Loving the brand and dark mode too!! Top work guys 👏

awesome kit....

Congrats on the launch! Does # of participants depends on what version is used?