How many participants are supported in a session?

Question

How many participants can I have in a Vonage Video API session?

Applies To

• Vonage Video API
• Video Session
• Multi-Party
• Broadcast
• Session Participants

Answer

While Vonage Video API platform can manage a virtually unlimited number of concurrent sessions and participants, the number of participants in each session is limited by client-side bandwidth, device, and CPU limitations for processing vast amounts of video and audio streams. The number of participants supported in an Vonage Video API session would depend on the session topology.

In a scenario where all participants publish and all participants subscribe to all streams from all other participants, a fully meshed multi-party video session, OpenTok cloud can support up to 55 participants. This number is limited by the ability of your end-device to receive, decode, and render such a large number of streams simultaneously. A design where not all participants publish and not all participants subscribe to all streams is sometimes more appropriate.

A different topology is a Broadcast session, with one or a few participants publishing streams and the viewers of the broadcast only subscribing to those streams. For a session with broadcast topology, you need to consider both the total number of publishers (Broadcasters), the streams that each Broadcaster is publishing, and the total number of participants that are interactively subscribing to all of the Broadcasters.

Additional Information

For a table showing the number of Viewers and Publishers, see the Developer documentation for Live Interactive Video Broadcasts.

Broadcasters                                                Viewers