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Comment by mgamache | Hacker News Reader

note: you can't really have 1000 people on a call. It's just a live streaming event at that point. You can use standard live streaming techniques for doing this. Yes, it will have 10-20 second latency (or more), but in large calls, most people don't interact with the speaker.

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I don't know about Zoom, but I run a video platform and you can definitely have 1000 people on a call. The caveat is that you can't consume everyone's video and audio, so consuming a new person's audio and video takes a second or two. This works fine if you have 2-20 main speakers and a few of the 1000 people "raising their hand" to talk.

> You can use standard live streaming techniques for doing this. Yes, it will have 10-20 second latency (or more)

You can do sub-second latencies with DASH and HLS. Not sub-second enough to do pleasant two-way communication, but literally an order of magnitude better than 10 seconds!

I used a combination of WebSockets and HLS so that speakers could be live, and listeners would get the stream via HLS. This was for an audio platform built with Twilio and home-grown HLS proxies using ffmpeg. There was a process where a person could go from being a listener to a call-in speaker--the web client had dual Twilio & HLS clients and could switch. The hosts had a dedicated iOS hosting app that always ran the Twilio APIs. They also had video APIs but we were doing internet call-in radio talk shows.

This is the answer. If necessary, you livestream a call run on a separate service (think: a call of 5-20 people on Zoom, where the audio and video/screenshare is piped into YouTube).

Right, if you want to self-host you can run something like Wowza (paid product, but it's a complete solution)

https://www.wowza.com/

at that point, livestreaming is already a pretty stable affair in the foss world. owncast and peertube both are solid players where you can do good livestreaming. heck, even pixelfed which is a sorta instagram alternative is getting livestreaming so that is a nice idea.

consider this. the "host" creates a peertube livestreaming link and sets it as unlisted. that way only people with the link can watch the stream. sure it wont have any moderation but is that possible in a 1000 zoom meeting beyond who can open the mic or share screen?

I think the idea behind a 1000 person zoom meeting is to "make" everyone feel like a participant, even if the reality is that they're not, they're just watching/listening. Live-streaming makes that more clear.

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