Video conferences have seen an enormously growing demand in recent years. With emerging new technologies and unprecedented growing business needs, the once called video chat has been transformed from something that was merely used for domestic and non-business related modes of communication into a technology that helps to strengthen relationships by keeping in touch with business partners and employees while saving time and boosting productivity. 

And, now the COVID crisis has shifted all communications between friends, families, students, educators, customers, clients, business partners, etc to digital. Hence, integrating video conference features into your applications would be a very wise strategic move (especially now) as this shift has made companies opting for either video conferencing APIs or attempting to build a video conferencing solution from scratch. Building the solution from scratch is harder and time-consuming and we’ve discussed it in the later sections of this blog. 

Video Conferencing APIs

A video conferencing (VC) API (Application Programming Interface) creates an interaction between two or more entities by providing technical infrastructure for different tools to communicate together to build an application. In simple words, it is an interface that allows different software to communicate with each other and exchange data. 

Building a VC Solution Vs Integrating VC APIs

Real-time communication has become an essential part of every organization. Therefore, adopting either an in-house VC solution or integrating the existing application with APIs that enable the video calling features becomes important. 

Building an in-house VC solution from scratch enables one to customize it according to the specific business needs and requirements with all the necessary functionalities in one place and makes it the brand’s product. Organizations can either opt to:

• Share files through the systems that are connected via the internet and do not require any centralized server.
• Share and save all the files through an application over a network on demand
• Use a service provider that allows the addition of new features in real-time to a cloud platform without the need for any backend infrastructure.

However, the end-product has to go through a few major challenges like the prolonged period of time taken to create, test, and run the solution resulting in increased production and operational costs. The solution, being home-grown and built, needs to be deployed and managed by the organization itself which might increase the operational complexities, ability to meet complex requirements and expectations. The solution also needs to provide high-end data safety, security, and encryptions at user, database, and enterprise levels. Apart from these, the in-house solution needs to be deployed either on home servers or on the cloud that is equipped to support this solution, if not then it requires a lot of tweaking to ensure that they support the VC app and remain stable during the uploads and usage. 

Whereas, embedding the existing systems and applications with a few lines of code to enable the video conferencing abilities with cutting-edge features will not only improve the productivity of the participants but also save design and development costs for the organization. 

• With ready-to-integrate APIs, the video conferencing integration becomes easy and quick in any business use case, abstracting away the WebRTC complexities. 
• Such APIs are enabled with built-in security standards and protocols that are automatically implemented during the integration process. 
• The AI and machine learning-powered video conferencing APIs enable personalizations, generate real-time analytics for the organizations and help them in critical decisions, noise cancellations, NLP-powered speech recognition, and speech-to-text features, etc.

How to embed a video conferencing API?

As easy as it may sound, the process of embedding a video conferencing API into an existing website or application or a platform takes just a few minutes to integrate some lines of prebuilt code. At times, such prebuilt codes might be difficult for a fresher or inexperienced developer to follow. Hence, it is suggested to keep a well-versed developer handy to configure the setup. 

Before installing, follow all the instructions mentioned in the API integration documentation carefully. 

Step 1 – generate an access token to authenticate with video SDK, utilize services, and integrate the solution. This access token must be authorized for all API calls. 

Step 2 – installing the prebuilt SDK into the application by, either, easily adding the prebuilt script to the website/application, or by installing the SDK using the NPM package manager.

Step 3 – add the script to the application by simply copy-and-pasting it.

Step 4 – Run the application with the prebuilt to enhance the application with advanced video conferencing features.

For a seamless and successful integration of the API, there are a few other components that are as crucial as authentication and access codes. 

• A server application that will grant access to the entire video and audio call services and syncs the data from third-party applications.
• A client application where the end-user can make real-time interactions by sending text, images, and make video calls with multiple users for virtual communication. 

A video conferencing API must be a straightforward solution for the developers to easily add desired functionalities without going through the entire development process. The VC solution must be built on robust technology that is bound to be easier to use. For instance, RESTful APIs have become the most common API design interface. Adding to that, claiming international codes and standards, like the ISO/IEC 27001:2013, will provide the competitive edge by declaring that the API meets strict information security requirements – which is one of the prerequisites for any video conferencing solution. A rich, comprehensive, and easy-to-understand/use API documentation kept in an intuitive UI acts as a cheat sheet for the developers to find everything with ease and debug without any hitches. 

If you want to integrate video conferencing capabilities into your existing systems and applications, do check out Libero. Libero is a video conferencing API as a service platform powered with AI and machine learning technologies that empower the rich ecosystem of content management, real-time and on-demand video conferencing features, and is easily customized and scalable.