The open standard WebRTC has the power to change the way we interact with one another over the Internet. Already integrated in a number of browsers, including Firefox and Chrome, the standard is inspiring many companies to offer multiparty videoconferencing solutions across multiple devices.
At the WebRTC Conference & Expo held in Santa Clara, Calif., one of the participating companies, AddLive, provided a demonstration of version three of its multiparty WebRTC solution. AddLive CEO Kavan Seggie demonstrated the platform’s interoperability with Chrome and Firefox – and even over a surprise device – and showed how it can enable extremely high-quality multiparty video.
San Francisco-based AddLive offers a full RTC stack that covers all major Web, mobile and desktop platforms. It positions itself as a simple, developer-friendly way to integrate live video, voice and text chat into applications using the emerging open WebRTC standard.
“We’re a full real-time communications stack, so this is quite different to the way other platforms have gone about developing their solutions. We’re a team of C/C++ based coders, and we focused on this from the very start. So instead of coming from the WebRTC as a layer and then trying to build up, in terms of iOS and supporting other devices, we have this core C/C++ library that makes it very easy for us to support Internet Explorer and Safari via plug-in as well as native iOS and Android apps, then we have SDKs for Linux for Mac OS and Windows. This also allows us to do other things like screen sharing.”
Seggie notes that the company also offers full service in the cloud, and since their system has been built to scale, it’s easy to increase capacity. It allows for massive multi-party conferencing and offers firewall traversal with proxy support. The company’s solution is currently deployed to over 5,000 businesses and a quarter of a million users through the company’s customers’ applications. Many of these customers are large pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers.
“We have both uplink and downlink ability. What this means is we adapt to certain metrics like packetized queuing delay, CPU usage, and we do this on the fly in real time. Not only do we do this according to the AddLive WebRTC but also with the Chrome WebRTC. The Chrome WebRTC will change on the fly as requested. We’ll tell it to throttle the bandwidth or improve the bandwidth, and it will do it. I think we’re the only people doing that right now. “
The company even offered a demo of their platform working with Google Glass, Google’s new wearable smart glasses that will experience a large commercial launch sometime in 2014.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
