Announcing increased flexibility and control with Twilio Video Recordings

Announcing increased flexibility and control with Twilio Video Recordings

In these unprecedented times, having face to face communications over video can bring people together. While real-time communications provide immediate connections, there are times when you may want to revisit the conversation or catch up on a meeting you missed. When it comes to recordings, Twilio Video provides flexibility and control to developers and businesses.

Today, we are excited to announce a major update for Video Recordings with the general availability of four features:

• Video Compositions API: provides developers the flexibility to compose the media files of a Room recording into a high-quality, custom layout that matches their specific use case.
• Composition Hooks API: allows developers to streamline the recording workflow and ensure the right Recording Composition is created for every Room
• Public Key Encryption for Recordings & Compositions: for enhanced security, we are offering Enterprise edition customers the ability to encrypt recordings and compositions with a customer provided public encryption key
• External AWS S3 Storage: Enterprise edition customers can configure the Recording service to push Recordings or Compositions directly to their AWS S3 Bucket.

How do these new features work?

Video Compositions

Video Compositions allow you to playback Twilio Programmable Video Rooms in your desired layout. For example, a layout that matches the original meeting or a layout that focused on the most important content. Twilio Video Recordings are stored in a very compact and reliable format as individual media files, containing either audio or video. These recordings cannot be played in a conventional media player. To play them, developers need to use the Video Compositions API to create a media file that can be played in a browser. This API creates playable files by mixing the desired audio and video recordings with the preferred format and layout.

Video Compositions allow developers to create playable files by mixing the individual recordings generated in a Group Room.

Video Compositions Hooks

The Video Composition Hooks API simplifies the creation of Compositions and automates your workflow. A Composition Hook is a template that Twilio applies to all Group Rooms created in an account. Instead of issuing a Composition create API call for every Room, developers can just define a Composition Hook and Twilio will do the rest.

Public Key Encryption for Recordings & Compositions

At Twilio we believe that privacy is an essential ingredient of trust. By default Recordings and Compositions are encrypted at rest in Twilio’s cloud storage. Some businesses, typically those that need to comply with strict industry or regional regulations for data protection, such as financial services, require additional security for their recordings. We built Public Key Encryption for Recordings & Compositions to address this need by offering an additional layer of security through the use of public and private keys.

This feature is based on asymmetric cryptography—where your business’ public key is used for encryption and private key for decryption. Since the corresponding private key is not available to Twilio, only the key holder will be able to decrypt the file to view and hear the recording. This asymmetric cryptography approach helps guarantee privacy, security, and integrity. You can access and configure this feature via an API or the Twilio Console.

External AWS S3 Storage

By default Recordings and Compositions are stored with Twilio. With this feature, developers can define their preferred AWS S3 storage bucket for their Video Recordings or Compositions files. Files are then automatically sent to the preferred S3 storage bucket for storage. This feature can be accessed and configured either using the API or via the Twilio Console.

Twilio Programmable Video Data Flows illustrating how Recordings and Compositions are created and stored depending on the different developer choices.

Pricing

For details on Composition usage pricing, check out the Twilio Video pricing page. Public key encryption for Recordings & Compositions and Custom S3 Storage are included as part of the Twilio Enterprise Edition.

With these new additions, developers now have the flexibility to create a recording workflow that matches their specific use case and security needs. If you have questions or ideas on how we can improve our recording service do not hesitate to contact us.

We can’t wait to see what you build!