The growth of Web-based real-time communications (WebRTC) is strong, and with strong growth comes a lot of news as competitors enter the sector bringing new products and services with them. Plus, the market itself offers plenty of news as its future is considered in greater detail.
Thus, there's a lot of ground to cover, and that's just what we're going to do with our standard Week in Review.
First, we had a look at the potential and the future for WebRTC, and the news for those interested in the platform is very good indeed. With a variety of applications coming available more and more frequently – instant messaging, file transfer and video chatting are just to start the list – available from within a browser without the need for additional plug-ins, it's changing the way we look at the browser.
With more venues of information coming out around the platform, and more products being developed for it in turn, the overall impact is very positive for the future of WebRTC.
Next, we had a report about projected revenue for the mobile location-based services (LBS) market. Berg Insight was projecting that by 2017, the European market for LBS would rise to fully $1.1 billion U.S. What's more, the North American LBS market would see some pretty substantial increases of its own, reaching $1.295 billion U.S. by 2017.
With around 50 percent of subscribers using some kind of mobile LBS services every month, it shows clear room for increased demand in the market.
The rise of WebRTC services so clearly shown across many markets prompts a need for discussion of future developments, and how current and forthcoming initiatives can best be integrated into a business' operations. Considering basic information, like what WebRTC actually is and how it works, can lead to new possibilities previously unconsidered, giving businesses the necessary background they need to improve their own footing in the face of an advancing paradigm shift in the communications industry.
Then, a report from Mozilla showed its own continuing commitment to developing WebRTC, as a recent Firefox Nightly release not only enabled WebRTC support, but also MP3 support and H.264 support in the Firefox browser – all by default.
The move to enable these features by default means that a future version of Firefox is likely to boast these as standard features, as enabling by default makes the transition easier.
Finally, there was a new report from Disruptive Analysis that said that despite all the analysis and all the consideration going into WebRTC, the ultimate potential of WebRTC was actually being underestimated. Disruptive Analysis, in a recent report, suggested there would be three billion WebRTC-capable devices, and one billion WebRTC users, by the end of 2016.
With several major companies in favor of WebRTC – Google, Ericsson and AT&T – and several major companies against it, including Apple and Microsoft, there would be major challenges to come, but also much more opportunity than previously thought.
That was the week in WebRTC, and what a week it was. With news, analysis and fresh product offerings surfacing in just about every direction, it's quite a bit to digest. But our global online community is constantly looking out for more news in WebRTC, so be sure to join us back here next week for more news, and naturally, every weekend for our Week in Review coverage!
