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 MoreLet's talk broadcasting for a second.
If you look at how media is distributed to multiple users, then you will find out that there are several approaches to this challenge. At times, I am asked on this, especially with regards to how to achieve that with WebRTC; so I want to put some basic understanding out there on how I view things.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert in this domain (well… I don't think I am an expert in other domains either, but it never stopped me from writing).
To that end, I want to go over 4 different general techniques of how to broadcast media to multiple participants over IP (none of them is "broadcasting" in its purest sense).
The most naïve approach to broadcasting is to send multiple streams to multiple participants. Since a single stream is usually referred to as "unicast", this approach is called "multi-unicast".
Things to remember about this approach:
Multicasting is an approach that IP networks allow. There's a whole bulk of IP addresses that are reserved for the task of multicasting. Essentially what this means is that if you want to "listen in" to specific content, you need to register for the relevant multicast address and miraculously, the media packets will get streamed your way as well.
Things to remember about this approach:
CDN is an approach taken to deal with the latency involved in sending media (and other resources) internationally.
If I have a server here in Israel, and the video that I need to share needs to be streamed to people in the US and Japan, then my packets are going to travel far. This will take time and aggravate my viewers. A better approach is to upload the content to a CDN, pay him a handsome fee, and have him deliver that resource for me, due to his global spread, this gives better service to my viewers most of the time.
Things to remember about this approach:
This one is BitTorrent – having the viewers of the content share it amongst themselves to assist in the delivery of the content and not rely only on a distributing server.
What is interesting here is that this is now also possible by using WebRTC's data channel.
Things to remember about this approach:
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Your turn – feel free to correct me or add information to this one.
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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