Nowadays, everyone observes the three concepts that are becoming very trendy which are Webinars, E-learning, and Video Conference systems. The major reason is that the Corona Virus (COVID-19) pandemic affects the whole world and enforces us to stay at home and perform our daily routine works from home including communication, learning, shopping, education and working, etc. Our lives are changed totally and we need a more remote way of living than ever before.
And one of the major impacts of staying at home is on our kids and youngsters as they should continue their education in schools or universities. Thanks to living streaming technologies that enable schools and universities to continue online education via Webinars and Video Conferences where Ant Media Server can be used to help you in building those systems easily and efficiently.
Real-time(ULL) and Scalable Streaming Engine: Ant Media Server
Ant Media Server supports N-N live video/audio conferencing by using WebRTC protocol that allows you to achieve ultra-low latency which is around 0.5 sec. Ant Media Server also provides scalability that can help you to scale up your solution dynamically in the case so many people attend your Webinar or Video Conference. If you are going to use AWS for your solution, please have a look at this blog post which describes how to set up scalable ultra-low latency streaming cluster in AWS.
Build Your Video Conference Solution
Create Video Conference Rooms
A conference room should be created first before other operations. In fact, this step is optional. If you don’t create a conference room, then it is created automatically after receiving the first join request from the clients.
However, if you want to control conference room validity in your application, then you need to create a custom conference room. It can be created using createConferenceRoom REST service.
Secure Your Streams
You could also secure your streams. To protect your streams, you can use one-time tokens for that. Please read this blog post for more details. The critical point is that; if you are planning to use a token for playing streams in the conference room then you need to define the room id to the token.
Built-in Data Channel for Messaging, Raising Hand, etc.
Other needs in conferencing besides live streaming are features such as raising hands, messaging, etc.. No worries, there is a feature of WebRTC implemented in Ant Media Server called Data Channels where you could send data in any form. So these kinds of features could be easily implemented with Data Channels and this feature will be released in a few weeks. If you want to have early access to test it, just drop us a line from contact at antmedia.io email address.
Seamless Screen Sharing and Video Camera(PiP) Streaming in Ant Media Server
Screen Sharing and Video Camera(PiP) w/o any Extension/Software
During webinars or video conferences, sharing your screen is a very common thing. In Ant Media Server, you have three options for streaming:
- You could stream your webcam only
- You could stream your screen and your webcam in Picture in Picture mode.
- You could stream your screen only
The best part is that you can do this streaming with your browser and you will not need any third-party software/extension or application to be downloaded as some popular application does today in the market.
Record Streams as VoD to Playback Later
After you complete your webinar session, you will probably need a recording of that session for future use as a VOD. No worries, you could easily enable recording with a settings option in the management console of the Ant Media Server. Furthermore, you could enable/disable recording on the fly with Ant Media Server REST API.
To sum up, you saw that setting up your webinar or video conference system is very easy with Ant Media Server. When you install Ant Media Server, a bunch of samples is also coming with the installation. There is also a conferencing sample among those samples. You can use those samples to speed up your implementation.
Hope you enjoyed the blog post, and if you have further questions, just drop a line to contact at antmedia.io.
You may also be interested in What Is E-learning? 12 Advantages of E-learning
