>Surely there are open source video chat solutions already? They haven't taken off for one simple reason: video hosting is expensive. It's quite literally one of the most intensive network activities you can partake in, rivaling torrenting.
There are, as you state OSS solutions [0]. But the video hosting is not akin to Torrenting. Most people are fine with 720p quality video as you're not "watching" the participants like a movie. And as you scale up the number of users the required bandwidth for each subsequent user goes down in a linear fashion due to reduced screen real estate. A conference with 8 users, from a video perspective doesn't reasonably take up more bandwidth than that of 2 given the smaller stream. I am on almost constant conference meetings with 4-12 users, many times with video and I have a full packet monitoring solution at home and can tell you it's not remotely as intensive as you've claimed here.
There are, as you state OSS solutions [0]. But the video hosting is not akin to Torrenting. Most people are fine with 720p quality video as you're not "watching" the participants like a movie. And as you scale up the number of users the required bandwidth for each subsequent user goes down in a linear fashion due to reduced screen real estate. A conference with 8 users, from a video perspective doesn't reasonably take up more bandwidth than that of 2 given the smaller stream. I am on almost constant conference meetings with 4-12 users, many times with video and I have a full packet monitoring solution at home and can tell you it's not remotely as intensive as you've claimed here.
[0] https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/