Webrtc for Business People

API Platform Vendors: Agora

This is an example of what you can expect to find for each vendor covered in the Choosing a WebRTC API Platform report, courtesy of Agora.

The following four pages include the information covering Agora capabilities related to WebRTC.

The full report covers the following active vendors:

The report is available for purchase online at https://bloggeek.me/webrtc-paas-report Choosing a WebRTC API Platform; 9th edition Licensed for [YOUR COMPANY] Agora

At a glance Focus Real Time Engagement services

Reference • Bunch (bunch.live) Customers • Dr First (drfirst.com) • Noon Academy (noonacademy.net) • Scener (scener.com) • The Meet Group (themeetgroup.com)

History & Founded in 2013, Agora offers a Real Time Engagement Platform-as-a- Pedigree service (RTE PaaS) that allows developers to easily embed voice and video call or interactive streaming, and text messaging on a global scale for mobile, web, desktop, or XR application

Main office Santa Clara, CA (United States)

Size 498 employees as of Q1 2020

Financials Raised $350 million in its IPO in June 2020

Interesting stat Agora powers an average of over 40 billion real-time voice and video minutes per month globally

Data centers Agora has over 250 data centers across the globe

Consider when you’re looking for a very low latency voice or video call solution over the public Internet, and an interactive streaming solution for very large group sessions (up to 1 million peak concurrent users)

Skip if you’re looking for traditional telephony

Choosing a WebRTC API Platform; 9th edition Licensed for [YOUR COMPANY] Overview Agora founded in 2013, enabling developers to easily embed voice and video call for mobile, web, desktop or XR application. They focused on their delivery network and media quality, improving their service as they grew. In June 2020, Agora went public in a successful IPO, raising an additional $350M in funding which it plans to use towards expansion of its services.

In the beginning, the founding team was trying to help solve an online gaming latency and packet loss problem. In that case, there were so many regional network providers that a signal traversing through multiple networks resulted in huge QoE challenges. After spending much time solving network quality issues, they eventually came up with a solution design idea which would later become Agora’s SD-RTN™.

With the support from early investors, Agora was born. The core of the company revolves around Agora’s SD-RTN™, a sophisticated virtual network overlay, which is combined with Agora’s in-house audio and video codecs, signal processing, and last mile optimization to create high Quality of Experience.

Agora touts its competitive advantage as providing a much higher level of data packet delivery success and maintaining smoother voice and video call experience compared to vendors using the public internet or generic 3rd-party vendor networks. Agora’s products and services are completely powered by its own virtual network, with smart route optimization algorithms, built and managed by Agora from the ground up to deliver audio/video quality in less than ideal, real-world connectivity conditions.

Agora focuses on delivering sub-second performance and efficient mobile data consumption on a global scale. Today Agora’s SD-RTN™ delivers more than 40 billion combined real time audio and video minutes on average per month.

Choosing a WebRTC API Platform; 9th edition Licensed for [YOUR COMPANY] Features and Capabilities Agora's signaling is using a proprietary protocol.

Basics

Voice Yes Video Yes Screen Sharing Yes Presence No Instant Messaging Yes

Footprint

iOS SDK Yes1 1Agora offers official SDKs for React Native, Android SDK Yes1 Electron, Unity, Cocos, Flutter, Linux, PC SDK Yes1 Windows and macOS

Multipoint

Voice Yes SFU based; 100 active Video Yes SFU based; 17 active; 1,000,000 watchers

Interworking

Outbound dialing Yes2 2Provided through an integration with Inbound dialing Yes2 TurboBridge for the native SDKs SMS No Number provisioning Yes2 SIP connectivity Yes2

Additional Capabilities

• Interactive streaming/broadcasting; up to 1,000,000 users concurrently • Wide variety of 3rd party integrations (transcription, translation, voice moderation, PSTN, etc.) with an Extensions Marketplace coming soon • No-code development tool (Agora RTE App Builder Beta) • Image-based video moderation • 3D Positional Voice Audio • CDN integration (file push to CDN) • Super resolution • Recording, cloud and on premise • Real-time messaging • Whiteboarding • AR Facial Mask

Documentation and Support Agora offers extensive documentation with quick start, developer guides and how to documents and videos.

Support is offered via Slack, email and a ticketing system.

Deployment and Pricing Agora is basing its pricing on a per minute use, along with the video resolution used.

Deployment

Hosted PaaS Yes 1Customers can install Agora proxies on On premise Yes1 premise that connect to the Agora’s global network

Pricing

Base monthly fee Free 2Different video resolutions have Usage model per minute2 different per minute pricing

Support tiers Multiple tiers3 3Enerprise tier includes 24/7 support

Customization & Available consultancy

Investment

Better browser Additional SDKs XLA, App Builder Added to report support Mar 2017 Dec 2017 Apr 2019 Oct 2020