What Should go into WebRTC’s Roadmap?

December 27, 2012

We are now closing up 2012, heading to 2013. Time of predictions and… roadmaps. What should a future WebRTC roadmap include?

WebRTC in a way is a done deal: it now runs on Chrome and soon on Firefox, Microsoft is there to some extent and Apple will have no choice but to join – maybe a bit later down the road but join they will. So as we are wrapping up this year, it is about time to start looking at possible directions that WebRTC's development itself can take us.

Not to burden anyone's vacation, here are my suggestions to the team at Google working on their future plans (not that they need me, but humor me with this one – make me feel important):

Higher resolution

First off, it is time to get some better resolutions from WebRTC. We run it using software video codec implementations and someone needs to put a stop to it – preferably the chipset vendors – not that I care – I am only making wishes here.

Higher resolutions means more use cases that can be covered with WebRTC. It means better penetration into the enterprise market. It means HD.

Mobile focus

What we miss today with WebRTC is mobile. Not something that goes as a third party SDK (my favorite deployment model for mobile at the moment).

The reason this needs to be in a higher priority is that mobile is complex, and leaving this to application developers or third party SDK developers leaves too much of a barrier of entry. This by the way, is a way for the telephony API vendors doing WebRTC to work on differentiation – the level of quality they offer to their media solution on Android and iOS…

What does mobile really means? Not only porting the solution, but also (and mainly) taking care of the whole media management when running on different types of networks: be it Wi-Fi, HSPA or LTE. I'd focus here on LTE first.

Better support for multipoint

That' a nice to have for some of the use cases, but a lot of the vendors dealing with WebRTC today are trying to solve the multipoint challenge. And it is a huge one.

It would be nice if WebRTC introduced an "out of the box" solution that allows better support for multipoint – probably in the form of SVC (Scalable Video Coding – a technical thingy that allows encoding once in different bitrates, resolutions, qualities, etc).

If the rumors of Google Hangout switching to WebRTC soon are correct, then this is probably a done deal already.

-

What would you ask from WebRTC to add?


You may also like

RTC@Scale 2024 – an event summary

RTC@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.

Read More