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Agora

Agora is a corporate broadcasting platform. It takes the signal from a meeting room, a studio or a presenter's desk, prepares it for delivery and brings it to employees — inside the company perimeter, on the company's own servers.

A company moves to a platform of its own for one of three reasons, and any one of them is enough:

  • Broadcasts and recordings must not leave the perimeter. An all-hands with the quarter's figures, an incident review, training on an internal policy — this is internal company data, and it cannot live with an outside provider.
  • There are many viewers, and they share one network. A thousand employees opening a broadcast over the internet at once run into the external link. Agora delivers from the inside, from the same network the viewers sit in.
  • The platform has to look like the company's own. An employee opens their company's internal platform — with its name, its mark and its colours — not somebody's service.

What Agora does

The cluster is run from the central panel, the single interface where everything happens: broadcasts are created, servers are attached, rights are granted, problems are diagnosed.

  • Takes the signal from a studio encoder, a camera or desktop capture software — over SRT, RTMP, MPEG-TS and the other protocols the equipment can send.
  • Prepares the broadcast for delivery: brings it to the resolutions and bitrates that let it open both on an office laptop and on a phone over VPN.
  • Delivers to viewers and spreads the load across servers — and, in a large network, across sites: a viewer arrives at the server nearest to them.
  • Records the archive so a meeting can be watched later, and keeps it on the company's own disks.
  • Shows what is going on: how many viewers there are, where the signal came from, why it degraded.

The shape of an installation

An Agora installation is a control plane and streamers.

The control plane holds the configuration of the whole cluster and decides which broadcast lives on which server. The streamers do the work: they take the signal, encode it, record the archive and serve viewers.

On a small installation both live on one machine — that is where everyone starts, and the quick start takes such a machine to a playing broadcast. When one machine is no longer enough, streamers are added to the control plane, and stream placement distributes broadcasts between them.

There is no separate "panel server" in this picture: the panel is part of the same product and is installed with it.

The customer's appearance

Agora is sold white label: the name, the mark and the colour of the interface are set by the installation, not by the build. An employee sees their own company's platform, starting with the login form: the appearance is fetched before login, so even the login page is already in the customer's colours.

The appearance is set when the box is installed, together with its other parameters.

Where to start

  • Quick start — from a clean machine to a playing broadcast.
  • Installation — what goes onto a real server and what the package does.
  • Administrators — the first accounts and their rights.