Hiven RTC hub is an internal service we use to coordinate with our fleet of RTC media servers. We use multiple different hosting providers across different regions in the world to provide the best quality voice & video calls while keeping bandwidth costs low; different countries and regions have different hosting providers.

Because these media servers are part of different hosts, we don't want to give them access to our internal network in any way, so we provide them with a WebSocket connection to coordinate with Hiven to set up RTC sessions, calls and more. The RTC hub is hosted internally so it has access to our internal services.

We open source parts of the Hiven source code to be transparent with our users and give an example for people interested in learning new technologies like Elixir to go off.