Why architecture matters here
Conferencing fails on bandwidth and quality. Without simulcast + adaptation, one weak participant drags everyone down. Without noise suppression, poor audio dominates. Without captions, accessibility suffers. The architecture matters because each layer solves a specific problem.
The architecture: every piece explained
The top strip is media routing. Participants connect. SFU receives streams and forwards them. Simulcast layers let SFU pick per receiver. Bandwidth adaptation tunes per participant.
The middle row is enrichment. Noise suppression filters background. Captions via streaming ASR. Recording server-side + composed. Screen share as separate high-res stream.
The lower rows are ops. Reconnect + drain. Observability per stream. Ops covers capacity, failover, privacy.
End-to-end flow
End-to-end: 8 participants join. SFU receives streams. Each publishes 3 simulcast layers. SFU forwards low layers to grid; high layer to speaker view. Noise suppression on server side. Captions stream. Recording composed. One participant's network drops; reconnect within 3s.