Where are the Hosted Video APIs?

Video isn't like voice and will never be.

Here's a question from Quora than I answered some months ago: What's keeping telephony API vendors from adding video?

Twilio, Voxeo, Telesocial and others offer simple, easy, scalable, and affordable APIs for web developers. What's in the way of offering video chat/conferencing/messaging APIs along with the audio chat/conferencing/messaging APIs?

My answer at the time?

Telephony API vendors rely on circuit switching for the actual delivery of the service: they use the telco for actually providing their service, wrapping it up with APIs that enables developers to build their own use cases.
They might (or might not) add VoIP integration, where they can offer it through the browser, Flash or a mobile app - in all such cases, it will use gateways to connect back to PSTN (=circuit switching).

• Video is different. It lives solely on the internet, and so they have no network to rely on other than their own.
• Video requires knowhow in video coding, something that was hard to achieve until a year ago, when WebRTC was introduced to the world.
• Video require the end user to have an application installed to run it (WebRTC isn't common place yet) or to use Flash on a browser, limiting the end users who can use it.
• The investment wasn't worth the effort up until today. This will probably change once WebRTC stabilizes.

How things have changed…

If you are looking for video APIs then you already have TokBox and AddLive. Probably a few more for different use cases.

Now that WebRTC is happening, a lot of entrepreneurs are trying to figure out how to handle video processing: point to point is relatively easy with WebRTC out of the box, but then many use cases require broadcasting, recording, multipoint video conversations. For these, the easiest way is to use a specialized solution – and this is where video APIS come into the picture.

With demand – supply will come.

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Do you provide video APIs? How about leaving a comment on this post saying hi?