The time has come… We are excited to announce the final release of OpenVidu 3!
The move from Beta to General Availability of OpenVidu 3.0.0 marks the end of a journey that began almost two years ago. It was then that the OpenVidu team took the decision to radically change the underlying technologies and architecture of the platform in order to deliver the latest advances in real-time media.
Our journey here
We started developing Kurento over 10 years ago and it quickly became a leading real-time server due to its versatility. At a certain point, we realized that most of the use cases demanded by the market were focused on client-to-client WebRTC communication. To facilitate the development of such applications we created OpenVidu on top of Kurento, and it soon grew into a complete real-time media solution loved by thousands of developers and organizations around the world.
The platform evolved, until it was time to let go of Kurento as our SFU engine and fully embrace mediasoup. mediasoup has brought outstanding performance right to the core of OpenVidu, and it wasn’t long before we wanted to integrate LiveKit for its incredible ecosystem of SDKs and add-ons. This new fusion between the open-source LiveKit stack and mediasoup as the internal SFU engine forms the core of OpenVidu 3. On top of it we have built the best self-hosted, scalable, fault-tolerant and observable platform for real-time applications. Check out our new site here: openvidu.io
OpenVidu 3 has been in a state of free-to-use Beta during months, allowing users to test the new features and help debug it to make it production-ready. We believe that OpenVidu 3 has now reached a level of maturity suitable for real production environments, so the journey culminates here.
What is new in OpenVidu 3?
OpenVidu 3 brings tons of new features, cutting-edge optimizations, SDKs and deployment capabilities. The list of new features is long, but these are the highlights:
- Media optimizations: Simulcast, Scalable Video Coding (SVC), Dynamic Broadcasting (Dynacast), Adaptive Stream, Audio RED (REDundant Encoding), Hi-fi audio, Audio DTX (Discontinuous Transmission), WHIP… All of these low-level media optimizations will ensure your application is future-proof.
- New features: End-To-End Encryption, fine-tuned roles for participants, more SDKs for your application client (Android, iOS, Flutter, Unity, React Components…), compatibility with LiveKit AI Agents framework for the most advanced server-side media processing.
- Deployment and architecture: OpenVidu 3 greatly improves the DevOps experience. We put a lot of work into taking something that could take weeks and turning it into a matter of minutes. It is now easier than ever to configure, deploy and administrate your cluster. This, along with more efficient Master Nodes, simpler High Availability deployments, a lighter but powerful observability stack based on Prometheus… It all takes your deployment and its management to the next level.
- Development experience: we have built a cross-platform local deployment for OpenVidu. With a couple of commands you can have a fully-functional setup available in your local network to test across all of your devices. Are you an OpenVidu PRO client? You can now test and develop your application with all of OpenVidu PRO features for free using the Local deployment Evaluation mode.
OpenVidu 3 will make your real-time application more efficient, more performant, more reliable, more secure and future-proof.
Better deal for your money
With OpenVidu 3 we have taken the decision to simplify our pricing. We have gotten rid of edition ENTERPRISE, and now the only commercial edition of OpenVidu is PRO. This means that all of the features of OpenVidu 2 ENTERPRISE are now available in OpenVidu 3 for the price of OpenVidu PRO, which of course remains the same price.
The ENTERPRISE features now available in PRO are mediasoup support (for increased performance) and High Availability deployments (to provide scalability and fault tolerance for the most demanding applications).
In OpenVidu 3 many features previously available only in OpenVidu PRO are now available in OpenVidu COMMUNITY. Which means they are completely free! This includes S3 recording, broadcasting, network quality API, virtual backgrounds, phone call integration and a real administration dashboard.
The heart and soul of OpenVidu 3 remains open source., with OpenVidu COMMUNITY stronger than ever. OpenVidu PRO offers a truly cost-effective self-hosted solution for the most demanding environments
Upgrading from OpenVidu 2 to OpenVidu 3
For those users who have built their application using the OpenVidu 2 SDKs: we have you covered. We have created an adapter that will make your OpenVidu 2 application work directly against an OpenVidu 3 deployment. In most cases upgrading to OpenVidu 3 will simply mean updating a couple of dependencies in your application. You can read the complete documentation to upgrade from OpenVidu 2 to OpenVidu 3 right here.
We are also fully committed to provide support to all OpenVidu 2 users who wish to upgrade to OpenVidu 3. If you find any problem just write us to pro.support.v2apps@openvidu.io and we will be happy to help you in the process!
OpenVidu 2 enters now a long-term support phase. It will be properly maintained and patched, without any intention to transition it to EOSL.
For all those users happy with OpenVidu 2: don’t worry. We will keep maintaining this version in the future, which will still receive security updates and bug fixes
What to expect in the future
With OpenVidu 3 out, we are now entering a support phase for all those customers coming from OpenVidu 2. We will first focus on helping with migrations to OpenVidu 3.
Once all willing users have migrated to OpenVidu 3, we will follow a very exciting roadmap that can be roughly summarised as follows:
- Implemente some OpenVidu 2 features not yet available in OpenVidu 3 (mainly IP Cameras and Speech to Text).
- Develop a set of easily integrated AI agents to take your application to the next level: real-time subtitles and translation, full transcripts and summaries of your video rooms, key words and mood analysis… The possibilities are endless.
- Implement a powerful and customizable frontend web framework that will cover most videoconferencing use cases out-of-the-box.
- Provide native support to other cloud environments apart from AWS. Azure and Kubernetes are coming soon!
- Implement a mesh distribution of Media Nodes to support massive video rooms with capacity for hundreds or even thousands of participants in actual real time.
We are very excited about this new phase that begins here and now. Looking forward to seeing what you build!
