Many adjectives are being used to describe WebRTC this week, ranging from "crazy" to "threat." Everyone needs to exhale and put WebRTC into the proper perspective, rather than foaming at the mouth with excessive, dire warnings.
Over the past two decades, plenty of disruptive technologies have swept through the telecommunications industry, including the Web, VoIP, OTT, smart phones, and tablets. WebRTC is the latest building block of twenty years of incremental innovation, with more “fun surprises” bound to emerge over the next couple of decades.
Each one, like WebRTC should, has followed the same pattern. There's a burst of excited adoption, rapid deployment, followed by refinement and erosion of other markets and revenues as the new hotness is applied to different markets and spreads across the land. So the terms "crazy" -- excited adoption -- and "threat" via erosion of other markets and revenues do indeed apply to WebRTC.
We're in the excited adoption phase now, with the move to refinements taking place today. Apple and Microsoft haven't lined up behind WebRTC, but it seems a foregone conclusion both will have to adopt it at some point in the near future. Microsoft's emphasis on mobile and cloud platforms of late make it the favorite to get there first.
Corrections with new technology also occur, because too many players rush into the market thinking they can make money, only to find they cannot obtain market share and/or execute well enough to survive. VoIP and OTT are applicable examples to how WebRTC will pan out in the next couple of years, where firms jumped in, posted a flag, but didn't invest enough in sales and marketing and ended up folding. Others merged together to build bigger companies with enough critical mass to survive.
I know there's plenty of excitement about how "cheap" it is to get WebRTC services rolled into an app or service with fractions of a penny being tossed around as the cost, but that also means profit margins are tight for companies providing those services. VoIP OTT players survive selling PSTN access services at pennies per minute, with profits in fractions of pennies – the margins for error with WebRTC service providers are going to be razor thin.
Regardless, WebRTC is going to start eroding other markets in the near future. A lot of proprietary solutions for embedding IM, voice, and video into Web pages are on their way out. I don't if you can wholesale write off a bunch of voice and video codecs quite yet, because vendors will want to maintain the widest possible compatibility with existing and legacy systems. Soon, many UC and VoIP clients will start being affected as Web developers start building customized RTC apps, leaving more expensive programming talent freed up for other projects.
Many phone companies are getting onto the WebRTC bandwagon today. Those that haven' t yet are playing a balancing game between indecision and letting WebRTC mature a bit more, with the cost of entry likely to be higher the longer they wait. Telcos working with WebRTC now can do so at minimal cost, using a third-party service to start experimentation and trials. Those who don't, run the risk of not developing adequate expertise in-house to understand how to best apply the technology for use by the service provider and its customers.
Finally, WebRTC is by no means the "doom" of the telecom provider. VoIP, OTT, and IM have all eroded revenues, along a consumer transition from wireline to wireless usage. Phone companies may see an impact from WebRTC on revenues, but it will be a diffuse and slow moving one. There's also the potential to add to the bottom line with WebRTC services for businesses and by “gatewaying” calls between WebRTC and the PSTN.
Edited by
Rory J. Thompson
