Agora Video Call and Voice Call APIs – High-Quality A/V for Communal Experiences

Setting up video chat with Agora and PubNub

This integration lets you implement A/V communications directly into your application by bringing PubNub together with the Agora Voice, Video Call, and Live Interactive Video Streaming APIs.

Beyond supporting in-app chat messaging, PubNub acts as a signaling layer to orchestrate video and VoIP calls of any size, and to underpin live-streaming, large-audience events. PubNub also allows you to log chat events around the call itself to capture complete details and histories for later use.

This diagram offers a simplified blueprint that demonstrates how PubNub and Agora work hand-in-hand to orchestrate a private, one-to-one video call.

In this sample case, once User A requests a video call to User B, a few things happen:

1. The request is validated by the application server.

2. The application server creates the video session, and passes it as a Video Session Object to User A. 

3. Simultaneously, PubNub fulfills a crucial role by seamlessly passing the video invite to User B. 

4. Once User B accepts the invite, the Video Session Object is passed directly to User B, and the video call begins. 

In this chain of events, PubNub acts as a reliable broker of communications. It connects both users by passing along requests within 100ms of the initial invite. Using PubNub greatly simplifies the process of securely connecting tenants, and supports an instantaneous, lag-free experience for your users.

Building communal experiences with video and voice chat

The above demonstration offers a straightforward example of one-to-one video chat. But with this integration, you can also build in-app one-to-many video calls and communal live-streaming events using exactly the same principles. 

PubNub lets you easily publish messages to multiple users at once, even at large scale. So, extending the basic one-to-one pattern to support group video calls is simple.

When a user initiates a video (or voice) call, simply publish the invitation to any and all relevant users. All invitees will be prompted to join the video call at the same time, and your application server can then pass the video session object to those that accept the invitation.