Someone asked me while I was walking around the recently concluded ITEXPO event, to explain why WebRTC was such a big deal and I buried the lead, as usual, by talking at length about the royalty-free aspect of the codec - causing his eyes to glaze over. Persisting, I continued to talk about the impact of having the portfolio from GIPS and ON2 Technologies…his eyes were glazing over further. Eventually, though, I hit the right chord, saying that as a web solution, WebRTC is a bypass mechanism that allows every website to serve as its own communication solution – no carriers, no PBXs, in theory no extra equipment, and in theory an order of magnitude of better call volume.
Now my friend was on board, and I was on a roll. That is, until I followed up by telling him that WebRTC’s ability to support both peer-to-peer and traditional call models via the website clearly indicates that companies can be regulatory-free.
It also means that apps can integrate call models in all sorts of ways, including MMPG conferencing, Call Center click-through, speech recognition websites, and many others that we do not yet even understand.
They just listened and nodded, sporting a far off look and pondering what lies beyond.
And that is only the call model side. WebRTC has implications for streaming, voice, video and text with the data channel.
This produced a pure thousand-yard stare from my friend.
As an example of this, ToxBox has made solutions that connect fans to baseball players while the game is in progress, (okay it was done with Flash, but it could have been done with WebRTC) and Requestec connects patients to healthcare.
Also, TollFreeClicks uses a WebRTC client to call out to your toll free network while Temasys and Xirsys provide cloud services that help make your apps scale like Amazon’s AWS.
At this point my friend looked as though he was considering making a break for the nearest exit.
One cannot forget the video and voice conferencing services, such as UberConference and Vline and all the remote workers connecting to corporate networks like Thrupoint. Finally, there are all of the session controllers, such as inGate and Sansay, who are creating gateways to what exists.
And THAT is why WebRTC gets all the hype. Talk is free, and the opportunities are huge.
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
