Bandwidth/Transport costs for live streaming, especially in group conference call scenarios (where N streams needs to be broadcasted to N-1 participants) become prohibitively expensive after about 8 or so participants unless you can offload those bandwidth requirements to other places (e.g., like in a peer-to-peer architecture).
How Zoom manages to do this in a client-server fashion and is still financially solvent is also a question I've had for a while, but like others say, discounts on the transport and peering arrangements will be a key part in making those economics work, as compression and storage are relatively solved problems here.
> Bandwidth/Transport costs for live streaming, especially in group conference call scenarios (where N streams needs to be broadcasted to N-1 participants) become prohibitively expensive after about 8 or so participants unless you can offload those bandwidth requirements to other places (e.g., like in a peer-to-peer architecture).
I doubt they send N-1 full resolution streams to each participant. They probably send only the currently focused stream in full resolution, the unfocused streams in low res, and don't stream any of the non-visible participants.
As you change focus between the streams you can sometimes see as it renders the low res stream briefly until the high res stream is received.
How Zoom manages to do this in a client-server fashion and is still financially solvent is also a question I've had for a while, but like others say, discounts on the transport and peering arrangements will be a key part in making those economics work, as compression and storage are relatively solved problems here.