February 2023 Summaries

Daily powers real-time audio and video features to millions of people worldwide, utilizing a distributed network of media servers that route traffic scalably, securely, reliably, and at low latency. The Global Mesh Network is the backbone of this infrastructure, connecting media servers in 10 geographic regions and 30 network availability zones, ensuring "first hop" latency of 50ms or better for 5 billion people. This network is designed to support real-time audio and video applications, including video calls, events, webinars, and large interactive broadcasts, with a focus on delivering high-quality experiences while scaling to meet growing demands. The network's mesh topology allows for efficient routing and reduced latency, even for geographically dispersed users, making it an essential component of Daily's video-first applications.

Our Global Mesh Network routes packets with a latency of 50ms or better over an area covering five billion people, supporting real-time audio and video for millions worldwide, while our simulcast implementation has been fine-tuned to handle large-scale WebRTC traffic. Daily prioritizes call quality and reliability, aiming to deliver the highest possible experience for users, and also focuses on developer ergonomics, expanding video use cases, and contributing to the evolution of WebRTC through open-source projects like Mediasoup and GStreamer.

** The Daily video call API now offers a server-side `/rooms/:name/send-app-message` endpoint that allows developers to send "app-message" events to participants from their server-side logic, eliminating the need for separate client-side code paths. This feature enables sending data such as information that cannot be trusted to a client-side origin or data with central, non-participant-specific sources of truth. The new endpoint is demonstrated in a small demo using Daily Prebuilt, which allows users to send messages to participants from both the client and server sides. A server-side Netlify function is used to send an "app-message" event to a specified room, and a client-side handler parses the data and formats the greeting accordingly. This feature simplifies daily developers' lives by enabling them to send server-side data to selected Daily participants without additional messaging implementation.