Prior to today, Vonage Video API applications were managed completely through a "Tokbox" Account Portal, while other Vonage APIs, like Voice and Messaging, use the Vonage API Dashboard. This can be inconvenient for developers who use multiple Vonage APIs. To address this, we’ve made things easier by moving the management of Video API applications into the Vonage API Dashboard. This change simplifies development and gives Video API users access to improved features and ongoing updates in the unified Dashboard.
Current Vonage API Dashboard customers will now be able to build completely custom video experiences, including:
Secure video sessions, for 1:1 to many:many, and everything in between (Video API is GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC2 compliant)
Native client SDKs for web and mobile applications with for iOS, Android, React Native, Windows, macOS & Linux (IoT)
Interactive broadcast via WebRTC, with up to 15,000 participants, or HLS/LL-HLS with unlimited participants
Video + AI: Media and audio stream processors for live video use cases with live captions, transcription, background blur/replace, noise cancelation, and more.
It's easy to try the Vonage Video API with test credits: 2,000 participants minutes, plus 500 each recording, broadcasting, Audio Connector, Media Processor, and more! Find Video API pricing information here.
Before moving forward, it is important to note that we also offer a Meetings API – an extremely low-code video conferencing solution that allows you to integrate interactive meetings into your web apps with a single API call.
While the Vonage Video API platform makes it easy to embed real-time video into your web and mobile applications, there are a couple of key concepts to learn before starting.
Sessions - Every Vonage Video API video chat occurs within a session. You can think of a session as a “room” where clients can interact with one another in real time.
Connection - Represents a client (i.e. an end-user) that is connected to a Room and can use the Room’s communication capabilities. In a given Room there can be zero (i.e. an empty Room) or more Participants. A Participant can be connected only to one Room.
Publisher - Refer to a component or entity responsible for capturing and streaming video and/or audio content from a user's device to a video session. Publishers are typically associated with individual users or participants in a video conferencing or live-streaming application.
Subscriber - Describes a participant or user who is consuming video and/or audio content within a video session. Viewers are individuals who join a video session to watch and listen to the content being streamed by publishers. Viewers can still interact in real-time using signaling to chat, respond to polls, and ask questions
For more information, consult our documentation.
Navigate to the Vonage API Dashboard and log in. From the home page, click “Create a video session”. After clicking it, you will find instructions on how to get started as well as learn about the variety of SDKs that we currently have available.
Integrate real-time video
If you are new to the Vonage Video API, we’ve created the following resources to help you learn more about it.
Our complete Video Developer documentation can be found at https://developer.vonage.com/en/video.
https://github.com/Vonage-Community/sample-video-node-learning_server
https://github.com/Vonage-Community/sample-video-php-learning_server
To recap, we’ve improved the Vonage API Dashboard to include video as a channel along with all of our other Vonage APIs. You can now set up and control Vonage Video API applications, using the same developer tools and reports, such as Video Inspector, Video Playground, and Insights GraphQL reports. Note that with the introduction of the Video API to the customer dashboard, the Video API itself is NOT changing; simply, Vonage customer dashboard users will now be able to manage and control Video API applications through a single experience, Application ID, and billing invoice.
If you have questions, join us on the Vonage Developer Slack or send us a Post on X, and we will get back to you. You may also leave our Team some feedback on how your experience went. Thanks again for reading, and I will catch you on the next one!
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Michael Crump works at Vonage on the Developer Experiences team and is a coder, YouTuber, and frequent speaker of various .NET and cloud/communication development topics. He’s passionate about helping developers understand the benefits of each in a no-nonsense way.
