Since its inception in 2011, WebRTC has emerged as a game-changing technology In the world of online video streaming, enabling real-time communication without the need for plugins or additional software installations. However, one of the biggest challenges facing WebRTC adoption has been the perceived complexity and cost associated with effectively scaling the solution to meet the demands of large-scale events or applications. The standard was initially designed as a real-time peer-to-peer communications protocol, which has led many to assume that it isn’t suitable for one-to-many applications.
Many industry experts have voiced concerns that WebRTC is too complex and expensive to scale effectively. However, at Ceeblue, we have developed a unique approach that not only overcomes these challenges but also provides a highly scalable and resilient WebRTC solution for our clients.
Ceeblue’s Approach to Scalable WebRTC
While there are several cloud WebRTC solutions available in the market, Ceeblue stands out as the only EU-based provider with strict adherence to both GDPR and Schrems-II regulations, ensuring the highest levels of data privacy and security for our clients.
1. Standards-Compliant WebRTC on Either End
Our WebRTC implementation is entirely standards-compliant on both the client and server sides. However, we terminate the WebRTC connection at the edge of our network, allowing us to efficiently manage the streaming process, load balancing, etc.
2. Cloud Transcoding and WebRTC Repackaging
After terminating the WebRTC connection, we transmit the media across our cloud infrastructure and transcode it back into WebRTC format. This process is made possible by the incredible speed of our multi-protocol transcoder, which can take a single high-quality ingest and create multiple renditions in both primary and secondary formats in around 50 milliseconds. Not only does this process improve stream transport, it also eliminates the issues that normally occur when WebRTC is transmitted over large distances or to large audiences.
3. Preprovisioned Bare Metal Nodes and Multi-Cloud Autoscaling
To ensure seamless scalability, our Media Fabric consists of a worldwide mesh of preprovisioned bare metal nodes equipped with incredibly fast autoscaling across multiple best-in-class cloud providers. This allows us to dynamically allocate resources as needed, ensuring an incredibly high fault tolerance without single points of failure. We can deploy using different vendors, limit service to particular regions, or even deploy on-prem.
We own and run all of our own code, and manage our own infrastructure, resulting in a laser-focus on reducing latency and cost.
Real-World Scalability and Resilience
Ceeblue’s Media Fabric has proven its ability to handle massive scale and high concurrency. In fact, we have successfully streamed to more than 40,000 concurrent viewers in Latin America over WebRTC, showcasing our solution’s robustness and reliability. And there is no theoretical limit to how large of an audience we could serve—hundreds of thousands or even millions of viewers, all receiving ABR and fallback protocol-supported WebRTC streams to their devices, in under 500 ms.
Furthermore, our service mesh architecture, comprised of independent nodes, makes our platform remarkably resilient. Even if one node, or a group of nodes, fails, the others can seamlessly take over, ensuring uninterrupted streaming for our clients. Each node serves as an ingest node, transcoder, and egress node for all supported protocols.
Ceeblue’s WebRTC solution can also handle vast quantities of viewers accessing a stream simultaneously, up to 200,000 new viewers every 5 seconds. This level of scalability is of particular interest to broadcasters of sports events, events involving betting, monitoring and auction platforms, online learning environments, and interactive events, where large concurrent viewership is a common requirement and moments that “go viral” can collapse ill-equipped solutions.
Real Real-Time Scalability
By combining standards-compliant WebRTC on either end, real-time cloud transcoding, and preprovisioned bare metal nodes with multi-cloud autoscaling capabilities, Ceeblue has developed a scalable and resilient WebRTC solution that overcomes the perceived challenges of complexity and cost. Our unique approach enables us to provide our clients with a reliable and high-performance streaming experience, even during periods of massive concurrent viewership.
EXPLORE THE CEEBLUE WEBRTC CLIENT SDK
Source Code
github.com/CeeblueTV/webrtc-client
Prebuilt NPM Package
npmjs.com/package/@ceeblue/webrtc-client
TRY OUT THE WEBRTC VIDEO.JS PLUGIN
github.com/CeeblueTV/videojs-plugins
