Firebase Custom Internal Video Chat

[Tyler Duprey]

Building a company video chat feature on top of Google Firebase

Hey everyone, 

My company does a lot of online webinars. For public webinars we've been using YouTube Live and embedding it in our website as an iframe. We're very happy with that setup. 

However, we're looking to do live video chatting for internal employee meetings. We can't use youtube because private videos only allow 50 (we need 200 users) and unlisted videos aren't secure enough. 

I'd like to consider building my very own chat application on top of the Google Firebase hosting and the Real Time database. 

I am a decent HTML, CSS, and JavaScript developer. 

Question #1: Am I insane for even considering doing this myself? Should I just pay for a third party service that will allow for private videos over 200 people? 

Question #2: If I did want to take a shot at it, how would I start? What kind of shortcuts could I use because I'm building it on top of firebase? Do I need to use web sockets? Or does firebase negate the need for that? 

Thanks!

P.S. I'm not asking for specific code. Just general discussion about Firebase as a useful tool for a custom video chat app. 

[Mike McDonald]

Tyler,

You're not insane, it's been done before :)

The main thing you'll want is a good WebRTC provider to actually handle the video stream. The Realtime Database is good as a data channel for handling presence, establishing connections, etc., but it's NOT the thing you want to pump raw video through. The people who have tried the latter haven't had a good time ;)

I'd take a look at something like OpenTok, or this old thread about WebRTC signaling with Firebase to get an idea of how others have implemented it.

Thanks,

--Mike

[Tyler Duprey]

Thanks Mike! That's encouraging. I'll take a look at those resources!!!