Bull & Bear: Agora, the API Powering Clubhouse

-Agora is in a tricky spot, full of natural tensions:

Agora does a ton of engineering work and spends a ton of money on co-located data centers behind the scenes to make real-time audio and video just work. The result is that someone on WiFi in Ghana and another person on 4G LTE with spotty signal in Florida can sit in the same Clubhouse room with thousands of other people and hear the conversation cr... See more

If you’ve joined a conversation on Clubhouse , attended a virtual event on RunTheWorld, or binged livestreams on Bilibili you’ve experienced Agora. It’s been sitting there, in the background, making sure the audio and video come through clearly.

-It wants to expand to the west, but hasn’t made the proactive PR push that Zoom has to appease westerners security concerns.

-All of this is to say, livestreaming the technology is here, but livestreaming as a medium is not... Fundamentally what I’m pushing back on is saying that a technology will get adoption because it is big in China, when really we should be asking what made it catch on there in the first place.

-Acquires new customers

-It wants its customers to get very big, but not so big that they build in-house

The same room in standard video would cost $1,723 per hour, for standard quality. Premium would run you $3,883 per hour. It’s no wonder Clubhouse’s founders have said they want to keep the product-audio-only. Video is expensive!

Agora is an API-first business, which means it grows in two ways:

“A technology is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates” - Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death