Does WebRTC need a change in governance?
Is it time to change the governance of WebRTC in order to keep it growing and flourishing?
Read MoreWhen I see a post with the title "WebRTC And V.VoIP: Friends Or Enemies?" there are two things to do:
Consider this that post.
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I am going to present in two weeks' time at Enterprise Connect a long session about the Fundamentals of WebRTC. A lot of the material for that session is new – created specifically for the session. The main reason for it is that I bore myself if I talk too much with the same slides.
I also decided to start and finish that presentation with the following slide:
Many people forget that minor detail…
But it isn't enough. So here are 5 things that everyone should know about WebRTC – at least if he knows anything about VoIP or HTML5.
Here's a table I like showing in my presentations about WebRTC:
It shows a comparison between WebRTC and SIP. There are 3 things that can be derived from this table, all important, and all point to the advantages WebRTC has over SIP.
I find it funny when people try to put WebRTC in the same scale of a SIP solution and look at security threats of the two. WebRTC lives in a world of web, where the issues are analyzed and dealt with slightly different. Same thing with scale – WebRTC works well with distributed systems and web scale technologies (think Big Data); places where SIP isn't as flexible.
When trying to fit WebRTC into an enterprise setting, best to think of the problem statement in web related terms and not enterprise ones.
There are so many voice and video calling vendors, services and projects that use WebRTC that it is getting a bit crowded. It is also very boring. I think I've seen this past month every conceivable layout of talking heads imaginable.
But the thing is, WebRTC has a lot more to offer elsewhere. WebRTC is split into 3 main APIs:
Ignoring the Peer Connection for a second, there's a lot that can be done with the rest of the APIs that WebRTC has to offer. There are many uses for the Data Channel already, but there's also a lot to be achieved with Get User Media alone. Here are two:
None of these even deal with communications, but they were impossible to develop without WebRTC. It would be nice to see more uses of WebRTC beyond yet-another-way-to-make-a-video-call-and-kill-skype-or-webex.
There's a huge fight about the video MTI codec. That's the mandatory to implement codec in WebRTC. Is it going to be VP8 or H.264?
The thing is – not everyone cares. If I have a point-to-point video calling service, and that's all I need from WebRTC:
Just a pure video call between two peers.
All I need is for the browsers to decide which one codec they all support. Be it H.264, VP8 or whatever else they decide to use.
If you ask me, this is going to be most of the use cases out there.
As long as there's an agreement on at least one video codec that all browsers use, many of the vendors just don't care about the exact selection.
We've been talking about WebRTC for two years now, but the truth of the matter is that the standard isn't closed yet – there's no specification – no RFC with a number – just a bunch of draft documents.
That said, there are around 350 different vendors and projects that I am now monitoring – all using WebRTC. For a non-standard, that's quite a lot.
It means several things:
You can treat this as a challenge, or you can look at it as an opportunity to improve. Your choice.
WebRTC isn't perfect.
It isn't implemented on IE or Safari.
It behaves differently between Chrome and Firefox.
It has no video codec decision yet.
It has this ugly thing called SDP that everyone loves to hate and use it anyway.
It doesn't really work on mobile unless you make a real effort.
There's no good server side solution from Google for all of us to use for free in our services.
All that is true.
But it is also the best solution out there by far if you want to start building things. Use it, and instead of complaining, go find your own solutions and sweat a little.
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Want to learn more about WebRTC? I have just the report for you: WebRTC for Business People
Is it time to change the governance of WebRTC in order to keep it growing and flourishing?
Read MoreRTC@Scale is Facebook’s virtual WebRTC event, covering current and future topics. Here’s the summary for RTC@Scale 2024 so you can pick and choose the relevant ones for you.
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