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Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

(blogs.harvard.edu)
1597 points seapunk | 2 comments | 27 Mar 20 14:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.476s | source
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coder1001 ◴[27 Mar 20 14:47 UTC] No.22703220[source]▶
"the best of those, Zoom, is doing very well"

Is Zoom really the best? No other comparable platform out there?

Anyone know how difficult it would be to build something like it on top of aws or a similar cloud?

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1. sakopov ◴[27 Mar 20 15:26 UTC] No.22703626[source]▶
A while ago I remembered reading that a typical video conferencing/streaming setup on AWS has astronomical costs. I don't remember exactly which AWS services were used in the estimate but it seemed very prohibitive for startups.
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2. angry_octet ◴[27 Mar 20 15:45 UTC] No.22703858[source]▶
Yeah it's high bandwidth out (egress costs) and video processing is expensive, whether CPU (more cores * more time) or GPU (expensive instances). You basically have to process every input camera stream in real time to generate miniatures and do change detection (although at a lower frame rate, which you can signal to the client, so rate/resolution scaling is done client-side). VAD (voice activity detection) is client side, one mixer per output stream on the server -- not too bad. Video decode, mixing and H.265 encoding is expensive, but saves on transmission bandwidth.

Then consider that contention is terrible for real time and you would want dedicated instances.

I don't know the zoom architecture, but I doubt they could scale so fast without lots of cloud. I think they have an enormous bill, which they are using capital to pay for because they are becoming a household name.