This article provides information on how usage is calculated to help estimate cost, and information on accessing usage reports. Conference usage and cost are based on the following concepts:

Presence duration - The sum of time, or presence minutes, for all participants in a conference.

Content creation - The sum of time based on the type of content: recording minutes, HLS minutes, RTMP, and Real-time Streaming minutes.

Presence minutes - A participant's presence minutes is the time the participant is in the conference, measured by the join and leave timestamps.

Audio vs video conferences - An audio conference is audio-only. If a single video stream or screenshare is sent during the conference, the conference is considered a video conference.

Participant type - Meeting participants can be either active users who can send and receive audio and video streams, or listeners who only receive audio and video streams. The participant type is useful in understanding conference participation, but is not used for calculating cost.

How usage is calculated

Presence duration

The Presence Duration is the sum of time, in minutes, of all participants in a conference; the presence duration can be categorized as Audio Presence Duration or Video Presence Duration. The cost of a conference is dependent on the presence duration type, as audio and video conferences are billed at different rates.

Content creation

Recorded and streamed content are priced individually. Pricing is dependent on the type of content.

Content is divided into the following categories:

Recording - types of recording data. All recordings are stored for 180 days.
HLS - minutes of conference data that has been streamed using the HLS protocol.
RTMP - minutes of conference data that has been streamed using the RTMP protocol.
RTS - minutes of conference data that has been streamed using WebRTC Real-time Streaming.

Recording and streaming can be divided into five types. The following table describes the cost calculation for each type:

Type	Cost calculation
Raw	Based on aggregated recorded time for each participant. For example, in a five minute long conference that is recorded for two minutes, there are two participants; one participant is recording for two minutes, and the other is recorded for one minute. The raw recording time is three minutes.
Audio mix	Based on recording or streaming duration. For example, in a ten minute long conference that is recorded for five minutes, the recording duration is five minutes.
Audio call leg	Based on the sum of all users' recorded presence duration.
Video mix	Based on recording or streaming duration. For example, in a ten minute long conference that is recorded for five minutes, the recording duration is five minutes.
Video live	Based on recording or streaming duration. For example, in a ten minute long conference that is recorded for five minutes, the recording duration is five minutes. This recording type is deprecated.

Real-time streaming calculation

The presenceDurationMinutes, mixerRtsStreaming, and rtsViewingDurationMinutes fields in the Usage Reports can be used to calculate the cost for real-time streaming using WebRTC. The cost of a Dolby.io Communications APIs conference streamed using real-time streaming is based on the sum of these three fields, that correlate to three separate SKUs in your invoice.

Note: The rtsViewingDurationMinutes field is not immediately available in the Monitor API report, and the reporting may be delayed up to 24 hours.

Usage calculation examples

The following example calculates the presence duration for a five-minute conference with three participants:

User A creates a conference, joins the conference, and leaves after five minutes.
User B joins the conference one minute after the conference was created, and leaves the conference at the same time as User A.
Listener C joins the conference two minutes after the conference was created, and leaves the conference after one minute.

The presence duration = User A's time + User B's time + Listener C's time = 5 + 4 + 1 = 10 minutes.

The following table provides additional scenarios for calculating presence duration and recording duration.

Scenario	Calculation
Presence duration for a ten minute call with one presenter and two participants.	Presence duration: (1x10) + (2x10) = 30 minutes.
Presence duration for a ten minute call with two presenters, where three participants join for ten minutes and two participants join for five minutes.	Presence duration: (2x10) + (3x10) + (2x5) = 60 minutes.
Recording duration for a ten minute call recorded in MP4 format.	Recording duration: 10 minutes.

Usage Reports

Dolby.io dashboard reports

You can view and export statistical reports for your applications using the Dolby.io dashboard.

To view and export usage reports:

1. Log into the Dolby.io dashboard.

2. Navigate to Applications and click on the application for which you want to view usage reports.

3. Click on the Usage tab, where you can adjust the date range to view the summary for presence duration and content creation.

The Content creation tab displays recording, HLS, and RTMP minutes. However, actual HLS streaming minutes are not included in the report.

5. To export the daily aggregate summary, click the Export to CSV button.

The following table describes the fields available in the .csv file.

Field	Description
nbAllConf	The number of all conferences.
confDurationMinutes	The sum of time for all conferences, in minutes.
presenceDurationMinutes	The sum of time, or presence minutes, for all participants in a conference.
presenceDurationVideoMinutes*	The sum of time for all participants in a video conference, in minutes.
presenceDurationAudioMinutes*	The sum of time for all participants in an audio-only conference, in minutes.
audioSubscribedMinutes*	The audio-only duration sent from the server. Subscribed minutes is a historical way to calculate usage, similar to presence minutes.
videoSubscribedMinutes*	Similar to audioSubscribedMinutes, this applies to actual minutes occurred for transferring video and screen sharing. The value is calculated as the sum of all video received by all participants plus the sum of all screensharing received by all participants.
confRecordingDurationMinutes*	The sum of time for all recorded conferences, in minutes.
confRecordingRawDurationMinutes*	The sum of time for all raw recording data, in minutes.
audioMixRecordingDurationMinutes*	The sum of time for audio-only, Dolby Voice conference recording data, in minutes.
audioCallLegRecordingDurationMinutes*	The sum of time for audio call leg recording data, in minutes.
videoMixRecordingDurationMinutes*	The sum of time for mixed video recording data in minutes.
confStreamDurationMinutes*	The sum of time conference data has been streamed using the RTMP protocol, in minutes.
totalSubscribedMinutes*	The sum of audioSubscribedMinutes and videoSubscribedMinutes statistics.
confRtsDurationMinutes*	The sum of time for all real-time streamed conferences, in minutes.
rtsViewingDurationMinutes*	The sum of time for all viewed real-time streamed conferences (confRtsDurationMinutes), in minutes.

* This field is used for billing purposes.

Alternately, you can view usage summary and daily aggregate reports for your application by navigating to Usage in the left menu.

Monitor API conference reports

You can use the Monitor API to retrieve a detailed summary of a conference. The Monitor API conference report provides usage information, and only conferences that have ended will include a complete summary in the report.

Using the report, you can calculate the cost of the conference based on the following fields:

type
presenceDuration
recordingDuration
mixerLiveRecording
mixerRtsStreaming
mixerHlsStreaming
mixerRtmpStreaming

Frequently asked questions

Are listeners charged the same amount as users?

Yes. The cost of a conference is dependent on the conference type (video or audio-only), not the participant type.

Does the video quality/resolution affect billing?

No. Pricing is the same regardless of the video resolution.

Are there any monthly subscription costs?

No. You are only charged for platform component usage.

Are recordings stored, and is there a charge for storing them?

Recordings are stored for 180 days. Currently there is no additional cost for storage. However, we recommend that you move your recordings to your own storage infrastructure for security and data retention purposes.

Does the number of participants affect the calculation of content creation?

No. Content creation costs are only calculated based on the total duration of the content created, regardless of the number of participants involved.

Does enabling simulcast affect billing?

No. Pricing is the same for simulcast streams.

How is usage calculated for a conference where recording is started and stopped multiple times?

For conferences with multi-step recordings, content creation usage is calculated by taking the sum of all recording durations in the conference.