More than two years ago Juanjo Meroño and I started the project LooWID (www.loowid.com). As many of you already know it's an open source videoconference platform based on WebRTC that allow users to join in small rooms and share webcam, screen and audio and share files directly from browser to browser. Eduardo Rey has been also involved designing and implementing the interface and that helped a lot to have a nice platform.
It has been an good experience since we moved to make it open source instead of offering just as a service. Before we opened the project we tried to get feedback from friends and family and there were some interesting results. We asked them to fill a survey to guess what business model would be the best for LooWID. We were concerned that we should offer it as free but we needed to find a way to fund the infrastructure, and perhaps if the project grows contract an small team to work on it. We were asking about the way the project must be funded. There were some options like, mandatory pay for use, advertisements, or donations. Around 90% of answers were 'donations' but in the following questions asking if they would donate to use a service like that, in small donations regularly or a bigger one (10€ - 15€) once, they all absolutely answer 'NO'.
So our conclusion was that people won't pay for a service that is offered by others for free, so we decided to change the direction and go to a fully opened to try to involve more people in the project in order to keep it alive. We knew that our motivation in the project would end if there was no response, so opening we wanted to get more people involved looking for more feedback to get energy to continue.
In some way we got it because we got a lot of nice words in the project, a lot of translations of platforms like German, Russian, Hungarian, other helped promoting the app with their tweets, and also Jose Rabal helped us with security, so the project got some good stuff, but the same main developers that were at the beginning.
Now 1.4.1 release is out and included some interesting things like oembed integration in chat, but we realized that we can not afford big challenges like the one we were working on: the WebRTC relay. We were looking a way to grow up the numbers of users that were consuming streams in a LooWID room creating a relay in each client in order to build multiple tree structures that would guarantee thousands of users getting video and audio running a simple 1GB Ram server. That sounds great, isn't it? But reality is that the time we can invest after work is too small and that makes it impossible to assume bigger goals like that :-(
So we've frozen the project for a while, trying to rest and get energy again. I hope that soon we'll start working again in some new features.
It has been an good experience since we moved to make it open source instead of offering just as a service. Before we opened the project we tried to get feedback from friends and family and there were some interesting results. We asked them to fill a survey to guess what business model would be the best for LooWID. We were concerned that we should offer it as free but we needed to find a way to fund the infrastructure, and perhaps if the project grows contract an small team to work on it. We were asking about the way the project must be funded. There were some options like, mandatory pay for use, advertisements, or donations. Around 90% of answers were 'donations' but in the following questions asking if they would donate to use a service like that, in small donations regularly or a bigger one (10€ - 15€) once, they all absolutely answer 'NO'.
So our conclusion was that people won't pay for a service that is offered by others for free, so we decided to change the direction and go to a fully opened to try to involve more people in the project in order to keep it alive. We knew that our motivation in the project would end if there was no response, so opening we wanted to get more people involved looking for more feedback to get energy to continue.
In some way we got it because we got a lot of nice words in the project, a lot of translations of platforms like German, Russian, Hungarian, other helped promoting the app with their tweets, and also Jose Rabal helped us with security, so the project got some good stuff, but the same main developers that were at the beginning.
Now 1.4.1 release is out and included some interesting things like oembed integration in chat, but we realized that we can not afford big challenges like the one we were working on: the WebRTC relay. We were looking a way to grow up the numbers of users that were consuming streams in a LooWID room creating a relay in each client in order to build multiple tree structures that would guarantee thousands of users getting video and audio running a simple 1GB Ram server. That sounds great, isn't it? But reality is that the time we can invest after work is too small and that makes it impossible to assume bigger goals like that :-(
So we've frozen the project for a while, trying to rest and get energy again. I hope that soon we'll start working again in some new features.
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