The market analysis continues in the emerging WebRTC space, maintaining a decidedly positive outlook for the technology. The latest analysis comes in the form of a survey conducted TokBox — the creator of WebRTC-based, open video chat solution OpenTok — which polled just under 1,200 participants about the developer community’s attitude toward WebRTC.
The resulting report found that interest in WebRTC from larger corporations — in this case defined as companies with 1,000 or more employees — is “rapidly emerging,” while WebRTC adoption is quite high among smaller companies — those with under 500 employees. Indeed, over 27 percent of developers from smaller companies say that WebRTC has already become a critical component of their work.
In terms of enterprise developers, it seems that the ability to avoid downloads, along with overall simplicity, is a huge draw, while SMBs are largely attracted to lower latency and higher video/audio quality.
“These results overwhelmingly show that WebRTC is at the heart of change in the developer community, affecting industries well beyond communications,” said TokBox CEO Ian Small. “With OpenTok we have focused on evolving WebRTC into an enterprise-grade solution and the clear appetite from larger organizations shows we are on the right track. As the Web becomes a genuine platform for voice and video, we are seeing the imagination of the community drive a whole raft of use cases.”
Outside of video conferencing and telecommunications, WebRTC adoption is highest in the customer service industry at 25 percent, followed by education at 23 percent and healthcare at 17 percent. It has already been reported that potential cost savings are a major factor for healthcare organizations switching to WebRTC — which is likely a factor in every industry — tempered by a rise in telehealth.
Meanwhile, it seems that Flash and client downloading are dropping in direct relation to WebRTC’s emergence, with 41 percent of respondents saying they don’t intend to use Flash at all over the next 12 months. As for decreased client downloading, this may ultimately have an effect on the popularity of solutions such as Skype down the road.
Edited by
Ryan Sartor
