Opentok is really the best way to do this right now, if you're small and trying to build something creative with real-time video. I am guilty of treating their

Opentok is really the best way to do this right now, if you're small and trying to build something creative with real-time video. I am guilty of treating their system as a black boxen though. I know it from the API which gives you a lot of flexibility about how video streams are shared, who gets to publish, and who can record. We've been putting in various optimizations to reduce our costs (now that we got it basically running well enough to elicit a suspension of user disbelief). Without revealing too much, it is running in the low dollars per hour range to support users in the hundreds per hour range. Also, I built a way to manage amazon EC2s using perl and rex. Definitely check this out, it is really easy to deal with. http://rexify.org/api/index.html http://rexify.org/api/index.html