In the last post I wrote about our search for a commercial Webinar Platform that's really GDPR compliant and not just says they are. Unfortunately, that search bore no fruit since most platforms are either American or use American service providers which disqualifies them according to our requirements defined there.

In this post, we're going to explore open source alternatives, both commercially and self-hosted.

First though, let's review those requirements:

GDPR compliant
Recording of webinars
Multiple speakers
Up to 200 attendees
No registration for attendees (i.e. we don't want your email address)

If you want more details on the requirements, check out the previous post.

Going Open Source

So, we found no suitable commercial platform to host our webinar on, but maybe there's a thriving open source project that we can use?

This won't be a deep dive in technical solutions or in how to set up and operate any of these platforms, though I will try to link to relevant information whenever possible.

BigBlueButton

Our CEO Jimmy found out about BigBlueButton (BBB) from a post on LinkedIn and suggested I take a look at it.

BBB is an open source teaching platform developed by Blindside Networks and licensed under the LGPL.

The client is responsive and pure HTMTL 5 and JavaScript, written using ReactJS. The backend is written in Java, Scala and JavaScript and there's an optional front-end called Greenlight written in Ruby with some supportive JavaScript.

Hosted Solutions

BBB has a list of commercial hosting solutions on their site that - at the time of writing - contains five commercial solutions. Of these, the only company operating in a country we can work with (read the previous post) is Blindside Networks - i.e. the company developing BBB - from Canada. Unfortunately they use AWS so we can't use them.

Searching the web I found another provider, Big Blue Meeting, which provides hosted BBB. They're an American company though so no luck there.

Self-Hosting

I've been running services in production for more than 15 years so I'm not afraid of running my own software when needed. While a hosted solution would be ideal because it requires little effort on our side, hosting it ourselves means we control every part of the supply chain and get to chose service providers ourselves. We could even host it on an old server in our office. If we had an office.

Installation of BBB is straightforward if you follow the guide (may not refer to the latest version, though there's a link in the sidebar that takes you there). Essentially, you spin up an Ubuntu 18.04 server and run an installation script.

If you want to use another distribution or release of Ubuntu you're on your own so I suggest you go with the official variant because installation is super-smooth. The same script is used for upgrading BBB or installing extra features such as Greenlight.

Testing in a Local VM or Container

BBB won't work properly without an SSL certificate and the installer uses Let's Encrypt by default which solves this automatically. It does mean however that your BBB instance needs to be publicly reachable and have a real domain name, something you rarely have for a local VM or container.

I tried installing BBB in an LXD container with a self-signed certificate but couldn't get it to work. It's possible - even likely - that you can get it to work internally with a real certificate from a proper CA and a real domain name with the instance only being reachable on an internal network. You could also be better than me at managing CA certificates on Ubuntu and get it working with a self-signed certificate, though I gave up eventually and installed it on a virtual server at CityCloud (I've worked extensively with AWS for the past 10 years so it was fun to work with Open Stack for a change).

Evaluation

So, with BBB up and running we tested it out and were quite happy initially. You can limit sign-ups to invite-only and give users with emails belonging to a specific domain moderator privileges by default (this is all in Greenlight by the way). Meetings can be joined anonymously and there is recording support out of the box.

One thing we found that we weren't completely happy with was that there is no built-in support for blurring or replacing your background - if you want that you'll need to find an external tool.

When it came to the recordings though, it unfortunately fell apart completely. BBB "records" the meeting and then replays all video and audio streams individually on the player page - there is no easy way of getting a video file out of it that you can share online.

It may be possible to hack something together to get a video file from a recorded meeting, but that's out of scope for us so we left BBB behind and moved on to the next contender:

Jitsi Meet

I stumbled upon Jitsi Meet while searching for ways to blur my background on BBB. In a thread discussing BBB's lack of this someone mentioned that Jitsi Meet has that functionality, and maybe BBB could just build on that since Jitsi Meet is open source.

Jitsi Meet is an open source video meeting platform currently developed by 8x8 Inc. but has previously been owned by Atlassian and BlueJimp - which is the company the original author (Emil Ivov) founded. It is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

The client, like BBB, is pure HTML 5 and JavaScript. The backend consists of several services that work together to provide a coherent video meeting experience. Most of these are developed under the Jitsi name but independent software is also used - for example Prosody which is used for chat and authentication.

Hosted Solutions

8x8 hosts Jitsi Meet themselves at https://meet.jit.si, this is completely free to use and supports up to 100 participants per meeting. You can record meetings and upload them to DropBox (American company, mind you) or live stream them over RTMP to a service of your choice (such as Twitch or YouTube Live).

Unfortunately, both the fact that 8x8 Inc. is an American company and the limit of 100 participants mean we need to look elsewhere.

Looking around I found two providers of hosted Jitsi Meet in Europe. bit is a Dutch company that provides (among other things) server hosting. They offer a private Jitsi Meet instance, unfortunately they haven't responded to my emails so I can't say if they meet our requirements.

The other company I found is Fairkom. To be honest I don't really know what kind of company they are since their English site is half-German and my German is terrible. They seem to provide servers and cloud-like functionality though so would probably meet our GDPR requirements. Their Jitsi Meet offering max out at 75 participants though which isn't enough for us so let's have a look at hosting Jitsi Meet ourselves.

I also discovered that City Cloud's video meeting platform is Jitsi Meet. They're actually providing IceWarp which is including Jitsi Meet as the video meeting platform. We've already discussed City Cloud in the previous post however, so I'm not going to elaborate here.

Self-Hosting

Installing Jitsi Meet isn't as straightforward as installing BBB, though the documentation does a good job of detailing the installation steps.

The only hangup I encountered was when we tested the service out and found out that recordings didn't work. It turns out that for recordings to work you need to install an extra service called Jibri that handles recordings and livestreaming (to Twitch.tv, YouTube Live, or similar services). The installation instructions for Jibri isn't as good as for Jitsi Meet, though with the help of a forum post I managed to get everything working - after messing up the passwords a few times.

Evaluation

I like Jitsi Meet. I think it's the best video meeting platform I've used. Given a choice I wouldn't hesitate to choose Jitsi for meetings.

It works better than both Google Meet and Zoom on Firefox, has background blurring/replacement (on Firefox too!) and even has push to talk if you're muted. The only issue we've had with Jitsi so far is the tiles jumping around in the tiled layout from time to time. I have issues with the push to talk button not working properly for me - though I'm fairly certain that's because I use Synergy to share the keyboard from my personal laptop.

The Big Issue

The big issue with Jitsi Meet is the number of participants. At the time of writing, Jitsi Meet recommends no more than 35 participants on a single server (you can have more, but performance will likely degrade). This clearly isn't enough for us so would disqualify Jitsi.

I think there's a way to scale Jitsi Meet by breaking out the Video Bridge from the main Meet server and spreading the participants between them. I know that you can host multiple separate conferences that way, but I think it's also possible to have one big conference spanning multiple video bridges. Testing and implementing this is a bit too much work for me at this point though. I'm sure I could figure it out eventually, but I haven't got the time so we need something simpler that works with what we already have.

Throwing More Services At The Problem

So, Jitsi Meet consists of several individual services that together form a complete video meeting platform. Can we extend it by adding one more service?

I mentioned that Jibri supports livestreaming above and that's exactly what we're going to use. By only having the relevant people (and me) in the meeting and then livestreaming that meeting to everyone else we can keep the number of participants in the meeting low and still reach everyone who wants to watch. This not only allows us to reach our targeted 200 participants, we can go way beyond that depending on which streaming provider we use.

Streaming Platform

Obviously, we're not going to use Twitch.tv or YouTube to broadcast the webinar since both of these are American services.

I do, however, know of a wholly Swedish streaming service called Solidtango. I've done some integration work with them at a previous job so I've got some experience with their service and a quick check-in with them reveals that they're running their own servers which means we're in GDPR-compliant territory.

A few quick tests with Jibri livestreaming our meetings to Solidtango shows everything working fine so this is the solution we went for. You can use Solidtango for selling access to your streams and videos with revenue sharing and this requires your viewers to create an account and log in. Fortunately, you can make your videos and streams available for free and not require an account to view. Viewers do have to have an account to participate in the chat though, but we're fine with this since moderation would be hard otherwise - and you can still remain anonymous if you stay out of the chat.

There are of course other GDPR-complaint streaming platforms out there (PeerTube was mentioned on LinkedIn), but we found no reason to look beyond Solidtango since they're a good fit.

Post-Webinar Thoughts

The webinar was held on the 5th of October and you can find the video here. There were more than 120 unique viewers and after the webinar was over we invited those who wanted to into Jitsi Meet for discussion. We were at most 28 people in Jitsi with only one participant reporting issues with sound.

I count the webinar and the technology stack a success - and as far as I'm aware we were fully GDPR-compliant.

With our requirement of the number of participants greatly reduced, some of the services I've rejected would be in the running again - most notably CityCloud and Fairkom which are both running Jitsi Meet. When we reached that conclusion though, we already had our own Jitsi Meet server set up and we decided to stick with that.

We're keeping the Jitsi Meet instance around and will probably move all our internal meetings over to it (just need to scrub all old conferencing links from our calendars first). I'm not sure if we have decided on where to host the next webinar but depending on the number of participants I think it's likely we're going with either Jitsi Meet or Jitsi Meet + Solidtango.

Honorable Mentions

The first post actually got a few comments on LinkedIn (I'm amazed and thrilled anyone even bothered to read it) and we've also gotten a few tips after the webinar. I have not looked thoroughly at all of these but here's a short list if you want to dig a bit deeper yourself. All of these are likely better candidates than the first 10 in the previous post.

Eyeson

Eyeson is a German webinar/meeting platform that has an interesting approach: instead of broadcasting everyone's camera feed to everyone else in the meeting they encode one video stream on their backend and broadcast that to everyone. It's essentially the setup we did with Jitsi + Solidtango but with everyone's webcams and completely integrated. I think it's an interesting approach but unfortunately everyone in the meeting can stop the ongoing recording which makes hosting a webinar there that you intend to make available afterwards risky.

They also have an unusual billing structure (that I approve of) which forgoes tiers and instead charge you by the minute regardless of the number of participants in the meeting.

I kind of like Eyeson, but they're not a good match for our webinar so maybe another time.

Nextcloud Talk

Nextcloud is an open source (AGPL) "productivity platform" - think Google Workspace or Office 365 but you can host it yourself instead - or buy it hosted as a SaaS. I never bothered to look too deeply into this because we had already decided that Jitsi + streaming was good enough for us.

Switch

Switch is Swiss company that seems to specialize in IT infrastructure for educational institutes. They have a public Jitsi Meet instance and you can order your own private instance as well. I'm assuming that they run their own servers and are therefore GDPR-compliant, but I haven't actually verified it.

Quickchannel

Quickchannel is a Swedish streaming, video and webinar platform. I haven't investigated that much but the CEO assures me that they're running their own servers and their site says that you can run their software completely on-prem so they do seem to fit our requirements.