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Building, launching, and scaling a video app can be daunting. However, Twilio Video makes it simple by providing the flexibility to build a customized video experience that best fits your brand and use case. We have a family of tools to support you in every step of the journey as you build the best video experience.
In this article, we’ll cover those tools, which include the following:
- Room Monitor: This displays real-time information and metrics about a Twilio Video Room.
- Video Diagnostics App & SDK: This tests participants’ device and software setup, connectivity with the Twilio cloud, and network performance.
- Preflight API: This tests connectivity to the Twilio cloud.
- Network Quality API: This monitors participants' networks and provides quality metrics.
- Video Insights: This provides analytics and aggregations for observing your application, discovering trends, and troubleshooting rooms and participants.
Breaking down the development journey
Before we go any further, let’s break down the development journey into 3 stages:
- Build: This stage includes starting from scratch to alpha testing—it’s where you make sure things are functional.
- Iterate & Launch: This phase takes you to private beta with Twilio Video and typically has several users testing the video experience—it’s where you make sure your application can provide quality video and satisfy customer needs.
- Scale: This stage takes your video app from beta to general availability—it’s where you make sure your application is robust and scalable.
Now, let’s walk through each of the stages and how you can leverage these tools to improve your video quality.
Build
Before you start building your video app, you must have the proper setup to connect to Twilio. The Video Diagnostics App (available in the Preflight API) can test your device and software setup, connectivity with the Twilio cloud, and network performance. For example, the app will tell you that if you have a firewall in your office preventing you from connecting to the Twilo cloud, before you progress any further, remove the firewall when using Twilio Video.
The Video Diagnostics App is also extremely helpful in providing users their setup during the later stages, which we’ll explain in more detail in the Iterate & Launch stage.
Once you have the right environment, you can start building your video app with Twilio, which includes ensuring users can access the video experience and that track data flows properly to evaluate the quality of the video call. This is where Room Monitor comes into play.
Room Monitor is a browser-based tool that displays real-time information and metrics about a Twilio Video Room. You can add it to any Twilio Video JavaScript application during stages of development or debugging in-progress calls. Also, if you want to test how much bandwidth the video app consumes to adjust for the optimal environment, you can use Room Monitor to track that too.
Iterate & Launch
As we mentioned, this is the phase where you rigorously test and improve the video product to be ready for your broader audience. Let’s discuss each aspect briefly.
Continuous optimization
Once you have your basic video functionality set up, you can leverage numerous enhancement capabilities that Twilio offers to improve the video quality of your application. Again, the Room Monitor can provide you with real-time feedback on the impact of these enhancements. For example, if you want to validate whether Global Low Latency (GLL), which connects participants to the region with minimum latency to their location, can help reduce latency and/or packet loss, you can leverage Room Monitor to track the changes on these metrics.
Monitoring and troubleshooting
Then, when you start onboarding customers, you want to make sure that:
- Your end users have the proper setup for a good video experience before the call.
- You can monitor and troubleshoot for call quality during the call.
- You can investigate any user complaints after the call.
Check out this blog post to learn how to do all of them using the tools Twilio offers.
Scale
As more users start using your video solution, you'll need a way to monitor your video quality at scale to identify trends and proactively troubleshoot potential issues. The Video Insights dashboard provides this bird’s-eye view of usage and quality metrics across rooms and participants.
It also allows you to segment your participants by device and software characteristics (such as browser or operating system), track week-over-week growth, and understand day-of-week or time-of-day usage. These account-level aggregations help you move from being responsive to end-user complaints to observing quality and troubleshooting proactively.
Customize your video experience with Twilio Video
Now that you know how well Twilio supports you as you build, launch, and scale your video solution, why don’t you give Twilio Video a try? We can’t wait to see what you build.
