A new approach is proposed that contemplates systems and methods to support the operation of a Virtual Media Room or Virtual Meeting Room (VMR), wherein each VMR can accept from a plurality of participants at different geographic locations a variety of video conferencing feeds from video conference endpoints that can be either proprietary or standards-based and enable a multi-party video conferencing session among the plurality of participants. Each single VMR can be implemented across an infrastructure of globally distributed set of servers/media processing nodes co-located in Points of Presence (POPs) for Internet access. Each VMR also gives its users a rich set of conferencing and collaboration interaction hitherto not experienced by video conferencing users.