You probably heard about Chatroulette, a Flash website that allows you to video chat with random strangers. Ben Folds did a live improvisation during one of his concerts, which is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while:
The Chatroulette website was created Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old high school student in Moscow, and since then went viral with now 1.5 million users.
So how is it possible to scale so significantly without having a huge hosting bill? The key is not to use a centralized server (RTMP – Flash Media Server), but the new RTMFP P2P feature of Flash Player 10.0. All the video and audio communication flows directly between the clients, not involving any server. This means you can now build a large scale video community without having to worry about scalability and costs.
To learn more about Stratus visit Adobe Labs and read the tutorial.
