Patent ID: 9232191
Filing Date: 2016-01-05
CPC Classification: H04N

Claim Text:
1. A video-conferencing system comprising: a virtual meeting room engine configured to accept a plurality of audio and video streams from a plurality of video conference endpoints, each video conference endpoint being associated with one or more participants to a video conference and a communication protocol, wherein the communication protocol associated with at least two of the video conference endpoints are different from one another; and a globally distributed infrastructure configured to support operations of the virtual meeting room engine, the globally distributed infrastructure comprising a plurality of multipoint control units (MCUs) as media processing nodes, each MCU configured to process the plurality of audio and video streams from the plurality of video conference endpoints in real time, at least some of the MCUs configured to work together as a single MCU when hosting a video conference, wherein the MCUs are configured to use multicast communication and multi-bit-rate stream distribution and are geographically distributed in Points of Presence (POPs) at third party data centers to process audio and video streams transmitted from video conference endpoints that are associated with different communication protocols.