Live stream your Dolby.io conference call to thousands with api.video

With the growth of remote work and the need to communicate both audio and video with many people simultaneously, there have been a number of conferencing APIs and SDKs that have surfaced recently. One such API comes from Dolby.io. This API features real time video and audio (with all of the great audio processing you expect from a company like Dolby).

The conferencing works over WebRTC - which is great for immediate video sharing amongst a small group of attendees. For larger groups, it might be required to place those in 'non speaking' roles in a live stream. These attendees can listen in (or maybe participate by chat), but only the main participants will be on the conference call.

We've collaborated with Dolby.io to show how easy this can be done with api.video live streaming api. To showcase these features, we've launched dolbyio.a.video, a web application that starts a web conference, and adds live streaming.

The code

This app is based on a repo built at Dolby.io. The demo was expanded to a Node.JS app to obfuscate the api keys. An API token is generated on the server, and that value is then sent to the HTML page that controls the web conference.

To create a video conference, simply visit dolbyio.a.video. Enter a username, and click connect. You'll be connected to the Dolby system. You can then join your conference (you can pick any name for the conference). You'll enter the conference. Anyone else who visits the page and enters the same conference name will also join your conference.

Using the Conference

You can share your screen, play a video to the conference, and do all the other "web conference" actions you might expect.

api.video comes in on the RTMP url. You can have the RTMP streaming begin automatically when you join the conference, or you can manually initiate the stream. Streaming over RTMP is how you broadcast your conference to those in "listening" mode. If you initiate the stream in the demo application, you can watch the stream of your conference call.

When you share your screen - the presenter's image is placed in a bubble in the upper left:

Conclusion

In this post, we use api.video to extend the Dolby.io conferencing APIs to live stream with api.video. This allows the presenters of the conference to have a greater reach that would be available if they were just using the API - they can broadcast the conversation to thousands of viewers.