Zhao Bin, founder of Agora.io: Live streaming is the new trend, and the real-time Internet industry is growing at a massive scale

【51CTO.com original article】Competition in the technology industry is fierce. It is not uncommon for cloud computing startups to cater to the market, but they all collapse at the first sign of failure and have no real substance. In this precarious market change, the global real-time cloud audio network Agora.io focuses on the audio and video cloud field and concentrates on the research of audio and video cloud technology and products, becoming a popularizer of the domestic real-time Internet industry and a leader in real-time API.

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Before starting his own business, Zhao Bin, CEO of Agora.io, worked as CTO at YY. His previous work was dealing with audio and video communications, and he had accumulated tens of billions of minutes of calls. He is well aware of the biggest pain point of Internet-based communications on the market, that is, the instability of the Internet, which cannot fundamentally guarantee a high-availability, stable, and fast audio and video transmission. In order to solve this problem, founder Zhao Bin has always had a technical dream: to do real-time audio and video communications, which has a high technical threshold and is difficult to guarantee quality, in depth, and to provide developers, entrepreneurs, and related practitioners with a minimalist SDK and API. Just a few lines of code can help users solve these real-time communication problems and achieve high-definition, low-latency real-time calls in complex network environments.

Zhao Bin started his own business after leaving YY, and now he has Agora.io. Before starting his own business, Zhao Bin worked in a startup company in Silicon Valley, where he was the only engineer in the team doing audio and video communications. Later, the company was acquired by Cisco. As a serial entrepreneur, Zhao Bin learned how a startup team of more than a dozen people can find the direction to work hard, package products, gain customer trust, successfully launch them, and finally provide a "one-stop service" for mainstream products. Zhao Bin said frankly, "At that stage, I learned to adapt to technology." It is no longer just a domestic technical perspective and atmosphere. Analyzing the differences in Chinese and American technology and learning from each other's strengths and weaknesses does not mean that domestic technology is not good or that engineers' creativity is worse than that of foreign ones. The resilience of domestic engineers is very worth learning.

From being a CTO of a company to being the CEO of a company, the transition is not easy. The CTO controls the company's technology direction, the team's technology, the progress and efficiency of work, and how to improve the overall technical level, but as a CEO, he controls more from a global perspective to grasp the company's strategic direction and technical level, and understands where the industry can put technology to reflect the company's value. Zhao Bin went from being a CTO to the founder of a high-tech company. Although he is a CEO, he can also measure the company's operating strategy from the perspective of a CTO.

Although there are countless cloud computing startups, Agora.io is the best at real-time communication on the cloud. At present, there is no company in China that builds its own proprietary network specifically for audio and video communication in the cloud. In order to fundamentally optimize the transmission of the Internet and solve the pain point that "the Internet is not designed for real-time", Zhao Bin has been committed to providing developers with real-time communication based on the Internet since the beginning of his business. Through nearly 100 data centers distributed around the world, Agora.io has built a proprietary SD-RTN software real-time defined network on the public Internet, which can ensure fast, stable and high-quality data transmission, and ensure real-time communication of audio and video from the perspective of quality and efficiency. According to Zhao Bin, Agora.io's SD-RTN software real-time defined network is specially designed for real-time Internet, which is equivalent to building a dedicated highway on urban roads to ensure that when there is traffic congestion, it can quickly and effectively avoid congested sections and quickly and stably reach the transmission terminal.

The topic of cloud is linked to the endless security issues. Agora.io has more cautious considerations in this regard. Because the security requirements are higher when doing business overseas, and the confidentiality of mobile terminals is also stronger, so a more standardized design is needed for security. The access and rules for doing business overseas are more complete, and the distribution of industry segments is also quite different. Agora.io has accumulated many years of experience in security and has done a lot of additional standardized work. It has not only passed the US security standards, but also continues to build stronger capabilities. For example, Agora.io has passed the US industry encryption and security standard HIPAA (full name is Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). This is the security entry threshold for the US medical industry. It usually takes about 1 year to obtain HIPAA standard certification, and it can only be certified after passing countless technical, personnel, legal system and other aspects. At present, Chunyu International, a domestic cross-border telemedicine institution, and Talkspace, the largest online psychological counseling platform in the United States, have in-depth cooperation with Agora.io.

Live streaming is booming, and real-time Internet is growing rapidly

2016 is the first year of live broadcasting. The application of real-time communication technology in the live broadcasting industry has become a very typical scenario, such as voice and video connection, multi-anchor interaction, etc. In addition to typical live broadcasting platforms, live broadcasting is increasingly being used in various vertical industries of the Internet. This trend also has a far-reaching impact on the popularization of real-time communication in China.

One of the hottest trends in the real-time communication industry is QoE quality assurance. More and more applications are not just about implementing this function, but are hoping to ensure high availability, high connectivity and high quality in large-scale applications. Agora.io can be said to be the first company to provide "real-time communication" cloud services with QoE quality assurance. Through the backend dashboard, users can directly obtain call quality reports, including call connection rate, call clarity, call quality, call minutes, etc. It provides customers with real-time audio and video calls and fully interactive live broadcast technology that can be monitored worldwide.

In addition, Agora.io has its own proprietary private codec and audio and video coding technology specifically adapted to public Internet communications, which can ensure stable, fast, and high-quality transmission to the greatest extent possible. Currently, Agora.io's real-time cloud services are widely used in live broadcast platforms, social networking, enterprise collaboration, online education, games, telemedicine and other industries.

Agora.io's core business is to provide quality assurance services to developers. This is closely related to Zhao Bin's vision of serving developers in the early days of his business. "I hope that developers around the world can get"

90% of Agora.io's team are global technical engineers, including Apple's video algorithm architect, Vidyo product manager, Polycom engineering director, etc., with an average industry experience of more than 10 years. The team has experience in serving hundreds of billions of minutes of audio and video calls and *** concurrent Internet live broadcasts.

With the popularity of mobile Internet and live broadcasting, the overall product line and business volume of Agora.io have increased significantly. At present, Agora.io's real-time API has helped 30,000 developers, connected more than 300 million end users around the world, and served more than 200 countries and regions. So far, Agora.io has accumulated more than 5 billion minutes of real-time call services.

We believe that Agora.io will be at the forefront of the real-time Internet industry.

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