Reading a lot these days on opentok just for a broadcasting feature, came across this 'Live interactive broadcasting' a bit confused.
My question, how interactive broadcasting is different from the normal video chat (opentok)?
Actually the confusion is, in simple video chat if one client connect to a session and publish a stream to it and other clients just connect to a session and only subscribes without publishing their streams, isn't the same as how interactive broadcasting propose to work?
the main difference between interactive broadcasting and streaming broadcast is how the media is delivered.
Interactive Broadcast is a real-time session, same as a normal Opentok session, but with a large number of users. The subscribers will receive a WebRTC stream.
On the other hand, Live Streaming lets you share an HTTP live streaming (HLS) stream or an RTMP stream with large numbers of viewers. In this case, the subscribers will receive the stream using HLS (or RTMP).
Note: this adds a delay.
Actually the confusion is, in simple video chat if one client connect to a session and publish a stream to it and other clients just connect to a session and only subscribes without publishing their streams, isn't the same as how interactive broadcasting propose to work?
Yes, the difference is, again, how the stream is delivered to the clients (subscribers). You can implement the above use case both with interactive and streaming.
The difference is in the use case. If you need real-time low latency time interactions among participants (with a limitation on the number of users, you would have to use interactive broadcast.
Documentation: Doc: https://tokbox.com/developer/guides/broadcast/