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September 2026#

How Novakid runs 30 million live English lessons on OpenVidu

Novakid and OpenVidu customer success story Novakid and OpenVidu customer success story

Running a live video product where the users are seven years old is a challenge. Adults may tolerate a frozen frame or a reconnect spinner, but a seven-year-old just gives up, and the parent doesn't book a second lesson. That's what Novakid , an online English school for kids aged 4–12, has been doing since 2017. Over a million students, 50+ countries, more than 30 million lessons delivered, and up to 2,300 lessons running at once at peak.

We talked to Andrei Iakimov, DevOps Lead at Novakid, Inc., about moving their live classroom off a self-managed Kurento deployment and onto OpenVidu: why they migrated, why they didn't take the SaaS path, what that migration actually looked like, how they built scheduled autoscaling on top of it, what broke (and got fixed) along the way, and what they value most of.

Low Latency Live Streaming: Ingest WHIP into OpenVidu (Part 2)

A browser and OBS Studio pushing video into an OpenVidu Room over WHIP, and a viewer subscribing to it A browser and OBS Studio pushing video into an OpenVidu Room over WHIP, and a viewer subscribing to it

Part 1 of this series argued that if your video has to close a feedback loop with the person watching it, HLS and DASH structurally can't get you there and WebRTC can. That's the theory, and theory is cheap. So let's do the thing itself: take a webcam, push it into a self-hosted OpenVidu Platform Room over WHIP, and watch it come out the other side fast enough to have a conversation through. Then do it again from OBS Studio, which has spoken WHIP natively since version 30 and needs no plugin, no SDK and no code at all.

Low Latency Live Streaming: WebRTC vs. HLS and DASH (Part 1)

A split-screen graphic comparing a near-instant video call with a delayed live broadcast A split-screen graphic comparing a near-instant video call with a delayed live broadcast

When Spain was playing the World Cup, we noticed something annoying. We celebrated each of Spain's scores by shouting "GOOOOOL", 15 seconds before our neighbors saw the goal on their TV. Obviously, we ruined their experience watching the game, so much that they asked us where we were watching it from to avoid the gap. Now picture that same 15-second gap on a live shopping stream where you're typing "does it come in blue?", or in a video call where you keep talking over the other person because their audio hasn't reached you yet. That's the difference between "live" and low latency live streaming.