Welcome Kurento WebRTC team to Twilio

September 20, 2016
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Kurento WebRTC team joins Twilio

The Twilio family is growing: The team behind Kurento Media Server is joining Twilio.

Based in Madrid, Spain, the Kurento team has quickly made their project the reference media server stack for WebRTC media processing on the Internet. Racking up over 20,000 downloads over the past twelve months and spawning more than 200 projects on GitHub, Kurento’s modular architecture and developer ethos make a perfect fit to join Twilio.

In 2015, we introduced Programmable Video, which makes it easy for you to embed real-time video communications in your web and mobile apps. We focused on delivering an elegant developer experience that fills in the back-end operational challenges of any WebRTC implementation. Today, Programmable Video provides everything else you need for peer-to-peer video calls, including registration, signaling, and NAT traversal. The Kurento team joins us to extend that expertise with deep technical experience in large group calls, transcoding, recording, and advanced media processing.

Ahoy Kurento – Real Time Building Blocks

“Kurento” is a word borrowed from Esperanto, meaning “current” or “stream.” An artificial language created in the 19th century, Esperanto’s objective was grand: create an interoperability layer for human language around the world. While that language’s ambition was not achieved, its spirit is shared by the Kurento team, aiming to create the interoperability layer for media on the Internet.

Started five years ago, the Kurento open source project has become a wildly popular WebRTC media server on the Internet, attracting a vibrant developer community through its modular architecture. Similar to how GStreamer affords the developer an extensible framework for manipulating media files, Kurento offers a plug-and-play media pipeline to build rich real-time experiences with all kinds of media from audio, video and screen sharing.

The Kurento team estimates over 100 of these modules exist in the ecosystem they built, giving developers new capabilities ranging from large multi-party conversations and recording to more exotic media processing like computer vision and augmented reality.

Over the next several months, these Kurento media server capabilities will be integrated into Twilio Programmable Video. The team who built Kurento joins Twilio to lead the integration of their technology and continue our shared vision of enabling developers to build the next generation of video experiences.

Investing in Kurento Open Source Project

The Kurento open source project and its community will continue to maintain the project. Kurento media server will not be changing its license or core functionality. Twilio will work alongside the community in stabilizing core Kurento functionality, maintaining compatibility with all major WebRTC-compatible browsers and listening closely to feedback from the Kurento community.

Twilio is committed to ensuring the Kurento open source project is a stable foundation for media processing applications into the future. If you have more questions about Twilio’s plans for the Kurento open source project, get in touch by emailing kurento@twilio.com.

¡Bienvenidos a Twilio!

Over the past 5 years, the Kurento WebRTC media server team built a mighty project that’s used by thousands of developers around the world. Their vision of a developer-friendly interoperability layer for media processing on the Internet marries well with our mission to fuel the future of communications. Their addition to the Twilio team also marks our fifth office in Europe, adding Madrid to another rich developer community in which Twilio operates.

We’ll keep you up to date on the integration. In the meantime, please join us in welcoming Kurento to the Twilio team!

We can’t wait to see what you build.