4 New Business Opportunities to Explore with WebRTC

The mandatory beginning: I am writing a lot about WebRTC lately. You can start by checking out what WebRTC is, or by going over the WebRTC series I’ve published already. WebRTC changes everything. As such it brings a lot of threats to incumbent technologies and companies, but also interesting opportunities. There are 4 new business opportunities that can now be initiated by small IT shops around WebRTC that weren’t possible before.

While they won’t make for the next Apple company, they are going to be essential in the coming years.

GIPS Media Engine development and maintenance

WebRTC is cool, but it won’t be taking the whole market. Voice and video engines to drive video calling are going to be required in the future as well. Heck – they are wanted today. WebRTC offers the technology that GIPS provided and Google have open sourced. In this process, existing GIPS customers are left without an SLA. In order to protect their investments in VoIP, these companies will need to find alternatives. They have 3 as far as I can tell:

1. In-house development, either using new code, or by employing WebRTC’s source code
2. Switch to another vendor
3. Use their current investment and rely on  a third party to provide maintenance and support for it

If you are good at real time media processing, then it might be a good idea to get hold of WebRTC, which is an open source project with a permissive license, and offer such services to these kinds of companies.

WebRTC porting

WebRTC is running on multiple browser already. It will run in the future on smartphones – hopefully. But what about the rest of the products out there? Embedded systems, iOS and the rest of the world? Small IT shops who are smart enough can take WebRTC and offer porting services for it for customers – with or without the browser wrapper that it has.

WebRTC server hosting

WebRTC is a technology that gets embedded into a web browser, but in order to run it requires several server side components – STUN and TURN servers to route and relay media as well as signaling components that reside on the server side. A nice business can be made by offering server hosting for the media part and even the signaling or offering those as packages that others can install and manage on their own over the web. These are going to be necessary to build solutions using WebRTC.

WebRTC consulting

WebRTC is new. It requires adaptation form existing voice and video companies and it opens the door to virtually anyone to develop a video calling system. The only problem is that knowledge about it is lacking. There is a lot of business to be made out of WebRTC consulting – teaching companies what they can do with WebRTC and offering architectural advice on how to use it. - That’s it – 4 new business opportunities. If you are running a small IT shop, you should consider them. If you are thinking of leveraging WebRTC, then why not find the small IT shops that can assist you in the process?