Samvyo blogs

Who Gets Paged at 2am: The Failure Modes of Build, Buy and Embed

Every way of running video fails sometimes. What the choice of build, buy or embed really decides is who gets woken up, whether they can fix it, and what recovery waits on. Here are the failure modes of each path, using three real postmortems, one SLA and one security advisory.

Vendor Lock-in

The Switching Cost: What You Actually Rewrite to Move Video Providers

When Dyte became Cloudflare RealtimeKit, its customers did not switch providers, and every package, class and HTML tag in their code still changed. Using three vendor-written migration guides, here is what moving video providers actually rewrites, one layer at a time

cost-benefit analysis

What Your Video Bill Actually Adds Up To: Minutes, Egress, Recording, TURN and Storage

The rate card shows one number. The bill has five lines: minutes, egress, relay, recording and storage, and they behave differently depending on whether you buy per minute or run the media yourself. Here is one workload, 100 people in calls all working day, added up line by line.

NAT traversal

What Is a TURN Server, and When Does a Call Actually Need One?

A TURN server is the relay a call falls back to when no direct path works. Most explanations stop at "users behind NAT", which was written for peer-to-peer calls. Here is what TURN actually is, where ICE ranks it, and what changes when your media already goes through an SFU.

video compliance

Video Recording Compliance Across the EU, US and India: What Each Regime Demands

Video recording compliance is three rulebooks: a lawful basis in Dublin, everyone's consent in California, and — for a bank's video KYC in India — five years of in-country storage. What the EU, US and India each demand, taken from the legal text, not summaries.

Self-hosted Video

Video Deployment Models: On-Prem, Managed Cloud or SaaS — and Your Data Story

Every security questionnaire asks where your data goes and who can reach it. Your choice among video deployment models has already answered. On-prem, managed cloud and SaaS, compared on the claims each lets you make — and why in-country is not the same as in control.

Self-hosted Video

Self-Hosted Video Architecture: What You Actually Run to Self-Host Real-Time Video

A self-hosted video architecture is seven components, not one media server: signalling, SFUs, TURN, recording, storage, capacity and the network edge. Three of them decide where your media actually goes. The inventory, with what breaks when each is missing.

Bandwidth Cost

WebRTC Bandwidth Estimation: Why Your Call Downgrades Before It Drops

Users report that the video got worse and the network graphs look fine. Both are true. WebRTC watches queues filling rather than packets dying, so it reduces quality before anything is actually lost — and that pre-emptive downgrade is the mechanism that stops the call from failing.

NAT traversal

NAT Traversal in WebRTC: Why the Call Connects on Wi-Fi but Not on 4G

Same two people, same app. On Wi-Fi it connects instantly; on 4G it does not connect at all. Nothing changed but the network, and that is the entire explanation. Here is what NAT is actually doing, why one specific pairing can never work, and why mobile is where you meet it.

Firewall System

Why WebRTC Breaks Behind Corporate Firewalls — And the TURN/TCP Fallback That Fixes It

The call works on your laptop, at home, on your phone, and in every test you ran. Then you demo to the customer whose deal you need and nothing connects. Here is what corporate networks actually do to WebRTC, the fallback ladder that gets through, and what that fallback costs you.

Video Latency

What Sub-80ms Video Latency Actually Means — And Why Most "Real-Time" Isn't

A commodity webcam and a 60Hz screen consume about 110 milliseconds before a single byte is encoded. So sub-80ms glass-to-glass is not fast — it is arithmetically unavailable. Here is what the number actually measures, why that is still legitimate, and the one question worth asking.

Video Infrastructure

A collection of 11 posts