The amazing things about WebRTC and why should you adopt it?
I’m, sure you have heard that by 2021, video traffic is going to be more than 82% of all internet traffic and live streaming is reaching 13% of total video traffic. Through Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube billions of videos are being watched for a number of hours. With WebRTC, building online video chat applications have been greatly simplified.
The same trend has been for the webinars and web conferencing as technology growth has made webinar production easy and attending the webinar easier. From its announcement in 2011, WebRTC has grown its popularity and adoption for video calling but it is capable of much more. WebRTC is an HTML5 specification used to add real-time media communication and one can do that without any plug-in to be installed in the browser. You can learn more about WebRTC and it’s architecture at https://webrtc.org. In this post we will focus on some of the most important use cases of WebRTC and why you should care about it.
WebRTC Use Cases You Should Have A Look At
1. Enables Online Video Chat On Any Device
With WebRTC you can easily embed video calling in your applications or your website with as little code as possible. This allows you to create one-to-one video calling, multi party video conferencing or even more out of the box features if you start thinking about it. Being peer to peer, it allows you to establish direct connectivity between the parties without there being a need for a relay server.
2. File Sharing
Imagine the time when you wanted to share a large file over an email with a client and it just wouldn’t happen. And eventually you will turn to 3rd party storage services like wetransfer. With WebRTC you can directly send files right from your browser without having the need to email them ftp urls or links to cloud storage services. Awesome ain’t it?
3. Screen Sharing
Most of us today are working in collaborative environments working from different geographical locations. Screen sharing is something you cant escape when you are sharing ideas, or working on common source codes, or even sharing architecture designs with your clients. With WebRTC you can create screen sharing features just as easily as you can create video calling. And that too with in your existing application or your organizations CRM tool.
Aren’t these the features you always wanted to create in your own web application?
It couldn’t be more easier now with WebRTC. In fact, when google first introduced it in 2011, one of the goals they wanted to achieve was to “deliver a standard-based, real-time media engine that will be free and available in all available browsers.”.
As I have already stated that WebRTC is gaining popularity and has a very high adoption rate lets try and understand some of the benefits of using WebRTC.
WebRTC Benefits
1. Its Free
WebRTC is a free, open project that provides browsers and mobile applications with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple APIs. The WebRTC components have been optimized to best serve this purpose.
I am quoting this from https://webrtc.org. That says it all.
2. Platform and device independent
WebRTC is created using standard APIs defined by W3C or the World Wide Web Consortium and the networking protocols defined by IETF, Internet Engineering Task Froce. This allows for any browser that supports WebRTC to initiate a peer to peer connection with any browser running on any device with any operating system. So when you use WebRTC you dont need to worry about compatibility issues. Developers love this.
3. Secure Voice and Video
WebRTC APIs are enforced to work on secure URLs, plus they use an always on encryption with Secure RTP (SRTP) for both voice and video calls. This means you dont need to worry about man in the middle attacks tapping your calls even on a private wifi network.
4. WebRTC is an adaptive protocol
This basically means that a WebRTC connection analyzes network conditions and adapts to changing network conditions automatically thus producing an efficient use of the bandwidth delivering best possible quality with the provided network conditions. This is accomplished using the multiplexed RTP Control Protocol (RTCP) and Secure Audio Video Profile with Feedback (SAVPF). With that said, I am going to leave the technical details on this for another post.
Wrapping Up
If you have read this post entirely and you seem to have some specific questions, do let me know in the responses section. Or if you are looking forward to build an application that you think can leverage the benefits of WebRTC as mentioned above and you need my consulting, you can always reach me.
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Originally published at lightwsd.com on September 29, 2017.
