TECH

VKontakte now has unlimited video calling

The social network VKontakte has lifted the limitation on the number of participants in video calls on the VK call service. The developers achieved this thanks to their own unique horizontal scaling technology. According to the company, this is the first video call service in the world that does not have a limit on the number of participants in a call.

Now users of Android and desktop version of the platform will be able to use video and audio calls without restrictions. Interested parties will be able to hold various conferences, webinars, work calls and other events free of charge. In the near future, developers will add the option to iOS.

“To greatly expand the scope of calls, we removed all restrictions – including the number of participants in a videoconference. To do this, we completely rebuilt the platform architecture and learned how to scale the call to any number of servers, as well as implement solutions for server video transcoding and our own audio processing and noise reduction technologies. These and other deep optimizations have allowed us to save up to 60% of Internet traffic for our users, reduce device load and reduce battery consumption by 20%, as well as improve communication quality,” commented VKontakte Technical Director Alexander Tobol.

In early October, VKontakte announced that it plans to make its video calls available for posting on other platforms. To that end, the platform will release a set of SDK tools so that they can be integrated into services and applications. The release date was not specified.

AVnews