Are OTT’s starting to warm up to WebRTC?
Knock knock. You an OTT? WebRTC is here at your doorstep.
Time to wake up.
I have stated several times already that the ones that are going to be hurt most by WebRTC are VoIP OTTs. They have to adopt it in one way or another to stay relevant in the long run.
The weird thing? I’ve always viewed the OTT guys as disruptors. A creative bunch of agile developers that can conquer the world. They support millions of users with their mostly free services and they do it with elegance. That was my worldview looking from the solid enterprise world, where deals are long, number of users is rather small, and prices are generally high. I have always assumed that the enterprise VoIP guys will ignore WebRTC with their incumbent worldview.
And they did.
Up to a point.
It wasn’t a VoIP OTT that adopted WebRTC first, but rather an enterprise company: Vidtel. And then Digium. And several others as well. Don’t get me wrong – the enterprise market is full with incumbent worldview even today, where the comfort zone of believing WebRTC is a passing fad or an internet thing that will skip their business model and revenue stream is alive and well.
But I expected more from VoIP OTTs. And they failed me.
Up until now.
It seems that Tango is now supporting WebRTC!
Or is it really?
Tango Networks does, enabling service providers and enterprises to incorporate WebRTC through browsers into their SIP networks. Hmmm… must be the wrong Tango. Or more specifically – not the OTT service. More like another enterprise focused vendor.
And why should a VoIP OTT service adopt WebRTC? Only thing it does is make him question his business model.
It seems to me the incumbents are waking up faster than the OTTs when it comes to WebRTC. Someone should start finding out a solution for VoIP OTT players. And soon.
I think it will be a player like gtalk2voip to manage this first…