Level-up Your Meetings with Embedded Video - Reasons to Choose Whereby.

Video conferencing opens new business opportunities. You can use virtual meetings to hire remotely; talk to patients; host virtual conferences or book tours; and tutor students from across town or across the globe.

Whereby Embedded makes it easy to serve customers and clients using video calling. This guide will help you decide whether Whereby Embedded is right for your needs.

1. How does Whereby Embedded work?

Whereby Embedded is built on WebRTC. WebRTC is a standard protocol for real-time data exchange. It enables peer-to-peer communications in the browser, without the need for plugins or external software packages.

Although it's a peer-to-peer protocol, WebRTC still requires servers to manage connections and data delivery. That's where Whereby Embedded comes in. Whereby has built a network of signaling, TURN, and media delivery servers to support communications via WebRTC. It's video conferencing as a service.

Our REST API lets you create and manage meeting rooms programmatically. Use our web component and its pre-built UI or our Browser SDK to embed video conferencing into your website. Whereby also has SDKs for Android and iOS that make it easy to embed video conferencing in your mobile apps.

2. Can I customize the look and feel?

Whereby Embedded is a customizable video conferencing service that offers a few ways to add video calling to your application or service.

For web-based projects, you can use:

• our pre-built <whereby-embed> web component; or

• our Browser SDK with React hooks.

Our pre-built UI offers the quickest way to add Whereby Embedded. Your customers will have the same Whereby user experience that our customers do, and that we've worked hard to develop.

With our pre-built UI, you can set branding elements, such as your company's logo or colors using the Whereby Dashboard. You can also set them programmatically, per-room using the Room Theme API.

The <whereby-embed> component also lets you enable or disable meeting room features using attributes. For example, you can use audio=”off” to mute participants' microphones when they join the meeting. Or you can disable the chat feature with chat="off."

For greater flexibility and control over your meeting room's appearance, try our Browser SDK with React hooks. The Whereby Browser SDK decouples the video view, controls, and room actions, so that you can fully customize the experience. Our tutorial, How To Add Video Conferencing to Your Web App Using the Whereby Browser SDK, shows you how.

Whereby Embedded embraces web standards. For example, the VideoView component of our Browser SDK is a wrapper for the HTML <video> element. That means you can use CSS to give your video tiles rounded corners or drop shadows. You can also use brand-specific icons and JavaScript to create custom room controls.

That's not true for other video conferencing providers. Other services SDK’s also use web components, but do not expose any part of the component document tree to the parent. As a result, you’re locked into their meeting room’s look and feel.

We also offer native SDKs for adding video calls to iOS and Android applications.

3. How many participants can join a video conference?

Whereby Embedded currently supports video conference calls for up to 200 active participants, including 24 active camera streams.

For virtual events and webinars, there’s Viewer Mode. Viewer Mode supports an additional 400 passive participants. Viewer Mode guests can watch and listen to audio and video streams, and engage with your meeting via chat.

Whereby Embedded also supports breakout groups for larger meetings. You can host as many as 20 breakout groups per meeting room.

4. Is Whereby Embedded secure?

Peer-to-peer connections of 2 to 4 participants are encrypted (DTLS-SRTP) with user-generated keys. Data is also encrypted when its relayed by a TURN server.

For larger conference rooms, streams are encrypted while in transit from the participants' browsers to Whereby's media servers. Streams are decrypted while on the server, then reencrypted for delivery to each participant.

5. What about privacy and HIPAA compliance?

Whereby takes user privacy seriously. Our service adheres to the European Union/European Economic Area’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We collect and store only as much user data as necessary to provide the service.

Whereby doesn’t retain video, audio, or chat logs. Although calls and messages may pass through Whereby’s servers for delivery, they aren’t stored by Whereby once they reach the participants’ device.

United States entities that must comply with HIPAA can conform to the law by disabling streaming, and room integrations for all calls. For Grow and Custom plan subscribers, Whereby will also sign a Business Associate Agreement at no extra charge.

6. Does Whereby offer storage?

Whereby does not store meetings by default. However, you can choose to record and store your video calls. You can do this programmatically using the /meetings endpoint of the Whereby API. Cloud recording and live streaming costs $0.01 per minute of recording time.

Build plans include 30 ‘gigabyte days’ of Whereby-provided storage per month. That means you can store two 15 gigabyte files or 10 files that are three gigabytes each. Should you exceed your storage quota, you’ll pay an additional $0.0015 per GB per day, billed monthly. Volume discounts are available for Custom plans.

You can also choose to store recordings using Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service (S3). If you’re a United States entity that must comply with HIPAA, you must use S3. You’ll need to pay Whereby’s cloud recording fee, but you’ll pay Amazon for storage.

Keep in mind that Cloud Storage does not support breakout groups. You can't record what happens in a breakout session. You also can’t capture or store chat logs.

7. What is the pricing?

Whereby Embedded offers a free Explore plan if you’d like to test-drive its features. You’ll receive 2,000 participant minutes each month. That’s plenty of time to get a feel for the service, and build a proof of concept.

Once you’ve determined that Whereby is right for you, consider one of our paid plans. Paid plans include cloud recording, storage, live streaming, and transcriptions starting at $9.99 per month. With our Build plan, you’ll receive 2,000 participant minutes and pay just $0.004 for each additional participant minute.

Very high-volume customers should consider our Grow plan. Whereby can also create a custom plan if your needs require it. Our rate calculator can help you choose.

8. What if I get stuck or need help?

Whereby has robust documentation that shows you how to add Whereby Embedded to your product, and an active Developer Community on Discord.

For Grow and Custom plan subscribers, Whereby provides technical onboarding. We’ll also assign a Customer Success Manager to ensure a smooth implementation process.

Ready to get started? Add video conferencing to your platform with Whereby Embedded.