One of the biggest issues in WebRTC has been getting Microsoft and Apple more involved in the fray, as Internet Explorer and Safari haven't been seen to adapt very quickly. But one of these issues may be in for a bit of a decline as Rabb.it looks to bring its Rabbit video chat app out of private beta and into a wider release geared toward third-party websites.
The new app will actually, at last report, be separate from earlier Rabbit releases, but give website operators the ability to set up video chat rooms on sites, and in said video chat rooms, users will be able to watch videos or deal with other kinds of media as needed or desired. The product was slated to be announced at the TV of Tomorrow show, and is set for a demonstration at CES 2014 in Las Vegas.
While the Rabbit video chat app started out as an OS X private beta, reports suggest that, when Rabbit goes fully live, it will start out on Chrome and Firefox since it relies heavily on WebRTC to make it happen. Right now, Chrome and Firefox are pretty much the two front-runners when it comes to putting WebRTC to work. However, Rabbit's CEO, Michael Temkin, suggests that it won't be long before it arrives on other browsers, with the expectation that in the next six months, there will be other versions ready to go. Moreover, there are even some plans to make the Rabbit app available on other platforms, though some are expecting that Rabbit will focus on web-based video chat services for publishers, since it has a more readily applicable revenue model.
At once, this offers a couple of exciting key points for consideration. First, of course, is the simpler version, in that this may well be one of the ways to get WebRTC to other platforms like Internet Explorer or Safari, which have in the past proven somewhat hesitant about getting more fully involved with the WebRTC movement as a whole. It's an interesting consideration, really, that the operating systems may find that the applications programmers are going to pull along said operating systems, whether the companies behind said operating systems really wanted to go there or not. But beyond that point, which may or may not materialize, the idea of WebRTC is offering up a lot of possibilities that really weren't even considered as little as six months ago.
But this is the potential and the reality of WebRTC; it's going to continue to generate the new and the unexpected, and the fullest ramifications of this technology are only going to get clearer as we go along. This is a technology that's changing quite a bit, from basic phone calls to video conferencing, so it should be expected that it would have quite a bit of impact. Just how much, though, is likely to surprise most anyone.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
