New Skype Alternatives for Internet Broadcasting

4. Jitsi Video Bridge

Those more interested in a DIY approach may take a little more control of their own destiny by building their own infrastructure using Jitsi Video Bridge. Jitsi Video Bridge is the evolving WebRTC-based, open source video conferencing platform from the Jitsi team.

As was profiled in #VUC482, Jitsi Video Bridge is an impressive piece of work. Jisti eschews the heavy duty signal processing common to traditional MCUs, instead relying upon a stream switching approach know as selective forwarding. This strategy dramatically reduced the workload of the server, such that relatively modest hardware, like an Intel NUC, can satisfy some very real applications.

The Jitsi Video Bridge that was used for #VUC482 was a virtual machine instance with two virtual CPUs and a nominal amount of memory. It had about the same resource compliment as a VPS that once hosted this site. The most important requirement is high-quality bandwidth.

Of course, any WebRTC-based solution will feature encryption on all media handling. The fact that you can run the service yourself, whether on hardware or VM, allows to lock down all facets of its operation.

I’m seriously considering launching a local instance of JVB myself just to see what kind of trouble I can get into with such a tool in my arsenal.

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There you have it, from the extremely simple to a self-hosted geek-heaven, four free Skype alternatives that should serve an internet broadcaster well. Each of them are tried and true, even if they are cutting edge in some way.