Patent ID: 8514263

Claim:
A system, comprising: a virtual meeting room (VMR) engine, which in operation, accepts from a plurality of participants to a video conference a plurality of audio and video streams from a plurality of video conference endpoints each associated with one of the plurality of participants; a globally distributed infrastructure that supports operations of the VMR, comprising a plurality of MCUs (Multipoint Control Unit) as media processing nodes, each configured to process the plurality of audio and video streams from a plurality of video conference endpoints in real time, wherein the MCUs are built from off-the-shelf components instead of custom hardware and wherein the globally distributed infrastructure distributes the MCUs around a globe in Points of Presence (POPs) at data centers or cloud based servers to translate and decode the audio and video streams having different communication protocols coming from a video conference endpoints, wherein each of the POPs has as much processing power as required to handle the load from a geographical region that the POP is located, and the globally distributed infrastructure allowing for one or more other globally distributed networks to connect to it and directing the audio and video stream from each of the participants connecting to the VMR to a selected POP to achieve at least one of an ability to support a wide variety of audio video formats and protocols, a scalable mixing and composition of audio and video streams, a service delivered with reduced latency, a service that is capital efficient and cost efficient to operate.