What Developers Have to Say About Their WebRTC Plans - TokBox Survey
Infrastructure and video conferencing is what interest WebRTC developers.
TokBox has just published the survey they did a few weeks ago, with an interesting summation of it on their blog. There are two specific points I want to highlight there.
1. Infrastructure and tooling is key
While there are boatloads of WebRTC vendors out there who are focusing on tools and infrastructure for WebRTC, this isn't enough. There's a lot of variety with what developers are missing, but it all comes down to the missing pieces of WebRTC infrastructure (a place where I am estimating Vidyo wants a piece of).
The most interesting pieces? Support for mobile, multipoint, recording/archiving and security. (more on multipoint later).
2. There's too much focus on video conferencing
I think the graph says it all:
Too many companies are trying to out-do either Skype or the Polycom's of the world. Either this because the audience are focused on these areas or because this is the type of vendors that answered the survey.
If it is the trend of our market, then this is somewhat sad – there's so much more to WebRTC than just trying to improve on video conferencing. I need to look at my list (220 companies by now) and start arranging them by industries as well, to see where we're at.
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All in all, a very interesting survey. I wonder how the results would look like a year from now.
Tsahi Levent-Levi
Independent WebRTC analyst. I help companies ship real-time communications they can actually monitor. 20+ years in the comms space, last 13 focused on WebRTC.
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Absolutely! The new tool set of WebRTC has yet to inspire the creation of wholly new things. It remains largely focused on emulating existing things.
The emphasis on video conferencing is understandable when you consider how enabling WebRTC is over the current forms of VC. Many see this a the way to finally break the shackles that have been holding back user friendly and supportable VC deployment.
I can definitely see your points. As a person trying to innovate within the opentok world, I can tell you having a vision isn't enough. You need developers who can execute the vision and they are few and far between. I can't tell you how many have said they can do t, have the experience, etc. And all have fallen flat. Good intentions bad execution.
If someone knows of a good developer for tokbox/opentok in the US, I'd love to meet them.
I'm so excited by the opportunity and so discouraged by the ability to deliver.