July 2020 Summaries

At Daily, they provide a video API that simplifies adding video chat to any website or app, allowing developers to embed a prebuilt call interface across browsers and devices in minutes. The guide covers the process of creating a first API-generated video chat room, customizing room settings using configuration properties, controlling access with meeting tokens, embedding a Daily room in a web page, and reviewing data about rooms and calls. The Daily API supports advanced features and customization options, including building a text chat within a video call.

Daily.co has introduced track subscriptions, which allow participants to dynamically control who can see each other's tracks (microphone, camera, screenshare) in a call. This feature enables more granular control over media tracks and saves CPU cost by only decoding required tracks. A suggested use case is for the last person to join to introduce themselves, where all participants will see and hear that participant, but no one else. To get started, developers need a meeting token with `is_owner` set to `true`, and can use a pre-built UI demo to test track subscriptions. The demo uses the new `subscribeToTracksAutomatically` instance method and custom callback functions to subscribe and unsubscribe participants' tracks as they join or leave the call. With this feature, developers can create more engaging large meetings with dynamic control over media tracks.

The Daily API allows developers to add text chat functionality to their video calls, providing a convenient and flexible solution for teams looking to enhance their communication experience. With the prebuilt UI, users can quickly enable chat in their video calls without needing extensive coding knowledge, while also offering advanced customization options through the daily-js library for more complex use cases. By utilizing the Daily API, developers can create custom video call experiences with seamless integration of text chat, enabling features like sharing lesson-related links or follow-up information instantly via chat, and providing a better way to share thoughts and questions without interrupting the current speaker.

Daily has introduced an auto recording feature in their API to ensure important meetings, webinars, and classroom discussions are not missed due to forgetfulness. By creating a meeting token with the `start_cloud_recording` property set to true, users can enable automatic recording when participants join a video call. This feature is available through Daily's Scale Plan, and users can configure their meeting rooms and tokens with various properties, such as mic settings and screen sharing permissions. For testing purposes, tokens can be added to meeting URLs, and recordings are accessible via the Daily.co dashboard. For more seamless integration, tokens can be embedded directly into video applications using Daily's factory methods. This development aims to enhance user experience and mitigate the frustration of forgetting to manually record significant interactions.

Daily provides an API that allows developers to add real-time video calls to any app or website and make them easily accessible on platforms such as Amazon IVS, YouTube Live, Facebook Live, and Mux. To do this, users need to create a room and a meeting token, which identifies them as the owner of that room, and set up a stream with a streaming provider like YouTube. Daily handles the encoding and transcoding of the RTMP stream, allowing for low-latency communication and live streaming capabilities. With just a few lines of code, developers can create a fully functional live streaming room that can be broadcast to multiple viewers, with recommended participant limits to ensure smooth audio and video quality.

We're launching our new dashboard that provides key insights into video call usage and allows team members to quickly configure video call rooms directly in the dashboard without needing API requests. The new Overview tab offers a detailed view of billing plans, participant-minutes used, sessions, and rooms, making it easier for teams to understand their usage and gain insight into their video calls. Additionally, users can now customize rooms with API properties directly from the dashboard, offering more flexibility and freeing up developer time. This release also includes onboarding features, improved documentation, and a shared component library built on React, setting the stage for future updates that will further enhance the dashboard's functionality.