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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Seriously wondering! Why is Zoom worth $2B and companies are paying per minute plans to host meetings when you can now host your own videoconferencing software easily on your own website or app or intranet using WebRTC, branded, with your own experience, widgets, and it can all be open source? All you need to pay for are dumb TURN servers eg from twilio. Plus it would be far more secure.

For example we built https://yang2020.app/meeting

You can have stuff like that yourself, for free, no Zoom required. It’s open source

SPECIFICALLY what does Zoom provide? People can install wordpress easily, and 30% of the Web has. Why not for videoconferencing?

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This reads so much like the infamous dropbox comment.

For anyone wanting the link.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

How so? It's super easy to just download and put into any website. Look at the demo above.

It took us about 3 months of work to get all the quirks out, but anyone can do it. A developer can grab our library but if you don't know how to code, it's just a widget you get off the Internet. And it works on YOUR WEBSITE. This isn't like Dropbox because there is no desktop app.

So you're wondering why people use something that just works over something that took you (assumedly someone technical) 3 months to get all the kinks out?

How long do you think it would take a non technical team or company to get it up and running?

No. You’re just mistakenly comparing apples and trees on which apples grow.

It took us 3 months to turn WebRTC into something that “just works” on any website. The RESULT OF THAT is now available for anyone to use.

People can have it up and running in 5 minutes. On their own website.

Users have nothing to download. It just works, including on mobile web browsers.

Companies can also put it into their mobile apps.

So what is the downside again?

Can I host my own, or can I build my own? Is that platform ready to be installed and reused by other organizations?

How many people can you have in a single meeting?

It’s up to WebRTC and TURN server. Can be any number in theory. The layouts support 100 people, but each participant would have 100 peer to peer connections.

Perhaps one advantage of Zoom is that it rebalances things onto servers it owns eg via websockets? Is there documentation on this?

Recently, I have come across the so-called signaling server which seems to be another part being used with Nextcloud Talk. For Nextclouds the default signaling server can handle just about 4 participants. So there seems to be a bit more to it than just WebRTC and TURN.

What exactly makes this limit?

I have no idea (maybe PHP). I just saw that they a short info text in the backend and display a warning when you are having a conversation with more than 4 participants. Couldn't find any documentation on what the underlying problem is.

> An external signaling server should optionally be used for larger installations. Leave empty to use the internal signaling server.

> Please note that calls with more than 4 participants without external signaling server, participants can experience connectivity issues and cause high load on participating devices.

Probably it's just the sheer amount of connections you have to make. But it's possible to have even 10 people. Especially if you go through a central hub.

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