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Every client connected successfully, with a median join time of 2.7 seconds.
19 June 2026
Federated webinars come to eduMEET
eduMEET now hosts large-scale, presenter-led webinars on the same distributed, privacy-first infrastructure that powers its meetings. By spreading a single event across a pool of media nodes, a webinar can scale to thousands of participants - load-tested with 512 clients across six geographically-distributed nodes.
What's new
Large-scale events, hosted across the media-node pool
A webinar is a session with a small number of speakers and a large, mostly view-only audience - a lecture, a town-hall, a public briefing. eduMEET now serves exactly this shape by spreading a single event across many media nodes, routing each participant to the nearest, least-loaded node, and bridging presenter media between nodes so one event scales to thousands of viewers.
There is no separate webinar product and no streaming bolt-on. The capability is built into the platform, so it inherits eduMEET's privacy, on-premises hosting and open-source guarantees.
Any room can be a webinar
Webinars are a configuration of the roles every eduMEET room already has.
Host
Organizer
The room owner - full moderation, can promote and demote speakers.
On stage
Presenter
May share microphone, camera, screen and slides.
Audience
Participant
View-only by default; can be promoted to presenter live.
Proven at scale
512 participants across six countries
The webinar scenario - one presenter, nine panellists and a large view-only audience - was load-tested across six geographically-distributed media nodes in Poland (×2), Finland, Portugal, Germany and Denmark.
328 ms median latency
End-to-end median latency of 328 ms; 412 ms worst case across the longest hop (Finland → Portugal).
Smooth playback
No sustained stalls during the run; only three transient video freezes under two seconds.
1.57 Gbps delivered
Total audience egress of 1.57 Gbps, divided across the pool at roughly 294 Mbps per node.
8.71% CPU per node
Distributing across six nodes kept per-node load at 8.71% CPU and 1.7 GB memory - versus 54% on a single node.
Bounded bridging
Inter-node media bridging stayed at ~7.4 Mbps per node regardless of audience size - the key to horizontal scaling.
How to use it
Turn any room into a webinar
1 · Set the default role
Give the room a view-only “Webinar Participant” default role, so the audience joins muted and camera-off.
2 · Assign presenters
Grant the “Presenter” role to your speakers - per user or per group - in the management interface.
3 · Run the event
Organizers moderate, promote audience members to presenter live when needed, and operate the event from the same controls as any meeting.
April 2026
Federated webinars for eduMEET: work in progress
As part of an NLnet-funded project, we are adding federated webinar support to eduMEET, so a single large event can be hosted across a distributed pool of media nodes and scale to thousands of participants. The planned capability covers a view-only audience role with designated presenters, live promotion and demotion of speakers during an event, a speaker-oriented presentation layout, and webinar creation, scheduling and management (including calendar invites) - all built into the existing platform so that any room can become a webinar.
Following the design and architecture phase, an early alpha shipped in January 2026, and a feature-complete beta in April 2026 added live presenter promotion. Work now continues on testing at realistic scale, operator and developer documentation, and a 1.0 release later this year.
This work is funded by NLnet through the NGI0 Core Fund (project 2024-10-244), with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme. We will keep the community updated through the project and partner channels as the work progresses.
Acknowledgement
Funded by NLnet through the NGI0 Core Fund
This work was funded through the NGI0 Core Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 101092990.
The federated webinars work was carried out as NLnet project 2024-10-244 - “Federated webinars for eduMEET”. We gratefully acknowledge NLnet and the EC NGI Zero Core fund for their support.
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Host your next large event on eduMEET
Run privacy-first webinars on shared, open-source infrastructure under your own domain.