LiveKit Blog

How We Built a Globally Distributed Mesh Network to Scale WebRTC

Any time you’ve used Zoom, Discord, or Twitter Spaces, you’ve interacted with a media server. A media server is responsible for allowing clients to do things like exchange camera or microphone data in real-time. It behaves quite differently from say, an HTTP server. A media server hosts sessions,

The End of Participant Minute Pricing

We made LiveKit so every developer in the world could have access to a modern, end-to-end WebRTC stack for free. The growth of the project and community around it has been as stunning as the things we’ve seen developers build with LiveKit. We believe real-time, multiplayer applications that help

Announcing LiveKit Cloud

I recently spoke with an engineer whose company transforms agricultural vehicles like tractors into self-driving, autonomous robots for tasks like mowing, spraying and weeding. Seriously, this is straight out of Interstellar: Sometimes a farmer needs to take control of the machine—often deployed in a rural area with spotty internet

Cloud 100 Rising Star

We're honored for LiveKit to be named a Cloud 100 Rising Star [https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2022/08/09/cloud-100-rising-stars-2022-meet-the-newest-cohort-of-cloud-innovators/?sh=324b4d1056dd] ! Each year, Forbes in partnership with Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures, compiles a list of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world. Here's

LiveKit Community Day

The idea for LiveKit came when David and I tried adding real-time video to a side project. There just wasn't an open source, end-to-end stack that made working with WebRTC simple. Since our launch last July, the outpouring of love from builders and amazing projects using LiveKit has been equal

Universal Egress

WebRTC–a low latency protocol with ubiquitous support across devices–is fantastic for last-mile delivery, but can't address every need a developer has when working with audio and video. An application may want to do things like store a session for future playback, relay a stream to a CDN, or

Bringing Zoom's end-to-end optimizations to WebRTC

When we started LiveKit [https://github.com/livekit/livekit], our aim was to build an end-to-end, open source WebRTC stack accessible to all. After 20 months and nearly 1000 commits, we're releasing version 1.0 of LiveKit. This also includes 1.0 releases for these client SDKs: * JS 1.0

LiveKit coming to React Native!

Increasingly, developers are thinking multi-platform and how to get more done with fewer resources and maintenance overhead. React developers, in particular, naturally consider ReactNative as an entry point into mobile development. Since we launched LiveKit last summer, React Native has consistently been the most requested platform for us to support.

React Core and Components

If you're building with React, our React SDK makes it simple to add real-time audio and video to your app. We provide state management and media rendering utility components, allowing you to implement custom UI components and designs. The same SDK also includes pre-built components for constructing video calls or

Real-time audio and video in the Metaverse

In the last couple years, many exciting metaverse projects have started with visions to connect us through immersive, spatial environments; closer to how we connect with others in the physical world. A unifying principle among them is accessibility: a truly open metaverse should run in a browser, agnostic to hardware

Launch Week! 🚀

For the last few months, we’ve been quietly working on a bunch of things. Following in the footsteps of other OSS projects, we’ve lined up a whole week’s worth of announcements! Every day next week at 10am PT, we’ll drop something new. Here’s a preview

The Metaverse Needs Open Infrastructure

Pre-pandemic, we did most things offline. 2020 brought a sea change: we worked, shopped, studied, cooked, watched movies, exercised, dated, and even got married over the Internet — in short, we now did most things online by default. While it looked like the Brady Bunch credits, the moment we collectively began

Running LiveKit on AWS

This article is now out of date. For up to date instructions, see https://docs.livekit.io/deploy/vmIt’s now been a few months since we launched LiveKit [https://github.com/livekit/livekit-server], and we’ve noticed getting up and running can be tricky if you don’t have

An Introduction to WebRTC Simulcast

Everything you wanted to know about simulcast, but were afraid to ask Simulcast [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc8853/] is one of the coolest features of WebRTC, allowing WebRTC conferences to scale despite participants with unpredictable network connectivity. In this post, we’ll dive into simulcast and explore how it

Going beyond a single-core

A look at how we’ve pushed participant limits in WebRTC Background In preparation for our LiveKit [https://github.com/livekit/livekit-server] launch [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/livekit], we needed to know (and share) how many participants could join a room running on our stack. So, we spun up

And…We’re Live(Kit)!

tl;dr We’re building Stripe for real-time communications In 2006, Apple started building webcams into their line of plastic, white MacBooks. Seeing a new opportunity for people to connect over the Internet, I went through YCombinator’s “Summer Founders Program” in 2007 and launched the first website for meeting