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January 11, 2014

WebRTC Week in Review


While CES generally makes people think of robotics, gadgets, drones, Internet-connected devices and the latest TVs, cars and mobile devices, it also spiked some announcements in WebRTC, a technology enabling peer-to-peer and real-time communication over the Internet. Here are some of the top WebRTC stories this week.

Mozilla announced a new partnership with Panasonic this week to bring the Firefox OS to Panasonic smart TVs. This is reflective of the growth of devices and technology becoming more integrated. As WebRTC continues to grow in browsers, especially WebRTC-compatible Firefox, companies will have to be able to deliver solutions seamlessly across a variety of types of devices.

Polaroid also made some noise at CES this week with the announcement of a new product line, which feature cameras with peer-to-peer sharing capabilities, allowing the users to quickly move pictures from one user to another. The peer-to-peer connection capability allows for rapid transfers of photos between one user and another; the kind of thing that's somewhat similar to WebRTC in nature, and can prove useful when put alongside the Polaroid camera line.

Google has been working on VP9 4K, which is a video format that takes up about half as much bandwidth as other programs when it comes to streaming high-definition video. The company got some good news earlier this week when television producers like Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, Panasonic and LG, among others, announced their support for the platform. Not only did some of the world’s most powerful and popular television set makers hop on board the technology, but Google also got encouragement and support from chipmakers like Nvidia, Intel and MediaTek.

Huawei showed off its Ascend Mate 2 4G phablet at CES, but it also recently demonstrated its telemedicine-focused WebRTC technology, which is able to seamlessly integrate with M2M-enabled medical sensors to improve user experiences and the efficiency of telehealth. The goal is to make telehealth concepts, like chronic disease monitoring and familiarity nursing a reality. These medical sensors can include pulse oximetry, sphygmomanometer and a weighing scale to integrate with IP networks and collaboration and communication technologies, like instant messaging, HD video, file transfers and location sharing.

We took a look at a recent infographic highlighting the growth of different devices and how that relates to WebRTC. Outside of the WebRTC community, the view of Apple and Microsoft as dominant platforms continues unabated.  While obvious that the Windows world can use Chrome or Firefox browsers to get WebRTC, the reality is that this requires a user who is knowledgeable enough to understand that they must venture beyond the native IE browser. In a recent WebRTC Outlook survey conducted by WebRTC World, the largest barrier to WebRTC was identified as, "awareness."  This infographic certainly confirms that.

There are two dimensions of diversity in communications experiences: One is the number of distinct communications events, and the second is the variety of experiences in the event. We are already moving to a variety of different events.  For example, many of us use traditional phone experiences, but now include Skype, Web conferencing like WebEx or Go-To-Meeting, as well as a UC offer. It is generally agreed that WebRTC will change this by creating a much larger number of communications hosts and new paradigms. With more than 200 WebRTC start-ups, many focused not just on communications, but other applications, this is going to be an explosion.

We also looked at how Twitter and the idea of a directory intertwine. Twitter may be the best discovery and contact system for reaching out to new people without risking annoyance as, after all, it highlights and promotes followers. Twitter can be used for the discovery aspect and then, once discovered, take over signaling to establish browser calls.

Net Medical Xpress Solutions is looking to gain some ground on that front with its new RTC Conference Switch, the fourth WebRTC product from the company. With the RTC Conference Switch, organizations using the system can take a standard website—like the kind most healthcare organizations already have—and add a video conferencing system directly to said website, which can then be accessed and used via a standard Web browser. It's specifically designed to be HIPAA-compliant, and therefore uses audit controls, a proprietary permission software, and both public and private key encryption methods to help keep the conversations, and the content represented therein, sufficiently quiet.

WebRTC has the potential to disrupt the video conferencing experience. Currently, there are two major iterations of this experience: One where companies have a dedicated video conference room with extensive systems, and one that favors easy-to-deploy desktop conferencing with enhanced features supported by the cloud. The emerging WebRTC works to simplify the video conference process even further, which could make the second option even more popular.

Check back every week for the latest WebRTC news, reviews, trends and resources. Have a great weekend.


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