# Live classes on LiveKit Cloud

> Why we moved off self-hosted Jitsi, what's the same for students, and what changes for instructors.

Last updated 2026-05-20 · Source: https://prolaud.com/help/live-classes-livekit

## What changed

In-house live classes now run on LiveKit Cloud. The student-facing flow didn't change — they still open the join link, set a display name once, and land in the room. What did change is the entire backend stack.

## Why we switched

- No more "waiting for moderator" gates that anonymous-friendly Jitsi instances increasingly enforced.
- No XMPP / Prosody / Jicofo / JVB octopus to host yourself — LiveKit is a single Go binary.
- UDP forwarding 'just works' on every browser and OS; no Colima-broke-my-recording diagnostic loops.
- Built-in egress (cloud recording) with direct upload to your S3-compatible bucket.
- Adaptive 1080p simulcast — students on weak networks fall back to a lower layer automatically.

## What you do

Nothing — existing live-class records keep working. New rooms automatically use LiveKit. If you want to self-host LiveKit later (instead of using LiveKit Cloud), one env var swap moves you over with no other code change.

> **Note:** Free tier on LiveKit Cloud covers thousands of class-minutes per month. Egress (cloud recording) is metered separately — see the recordings doc.

## Related

- [Cloud recording → your CDN](https://prolaud.com/help/live-classes-recordings)
- [The Recordings index page](https://prolaud.com/help/recordings-index)
- [Watching a recording inline](https://prolaud.com/help/recording-player-dialog)