WebRTC Conference 2014 In Review

WebRTC can make you jump and fly

A year has gone by since the previous WebRTC Conference in Paris. Many things have advanced since then in the industry, this was well reflected in the conference. Presentations, demos and things presented at the exhibition seemed more mature. Last year when I spoke with some large vendors and service providers, a common answer to “What are you doing with WebRTC?” was – “We are looking at it”.

As I stated in the conference opening, we are beyond the “looking” phase, 2014 was all about doing.

Dan Burnett from Standards Play expressed this well in his standards review when he said discussions at standard bodies are now in a mature phase and are kind of “boring”.

Dan’s presentation was part of the conference training that included a state of the market presentation I presented on behalf of Tsahi Levent-Levi, standards review covering both IEFT and W3C by Dan and Victor Pascual Avila.

The training also included ORTC overview by Philipp Hancke from &yet talking about the implementations of Google Hangout, Firefox Hello and Microsoft’s position on ORTC. Discussion was about possible interoperability issues once Microsoft comes out with a WebRTC enabled IE browser.

The data channel training provided by Svetlin Mladenov from Viblast included a nice introduction to the technology and covered topics including SCTP, security and message size supported by the different browsers. Svetlin also presented some issues such as changes in Chrome with regards to controlling the buffer and issues in delivery reliability and knowing about delivery issues as they happen.

The conferenced was opened with an introduction I gave talking about the realities of WebRTC, some misconceptions and business critical applications and segments that already use WebRTC for their services. This was followed by 2 keynote sessions by Douglas Tait from Oracle and Dean Bubley who gave a taste of his report about WebRTC market status and predictions in an informative presentation.

The rest of the first day was dedicated to service providers.

The second day started with presentations about WebRTC for the enterprise. An interesting presentation was given by Fikri Firat Garanti Teknoloji. Fikri started as a network administrator in the IT department, he got caught up by WebRTC and started a change in the IT department leading them to develop based on it. It was interesting to learn how IT departments view and benefit from this technology.

The WebRTC server side included a presentation by Juan Carlos talking about Nubomedia and the Kurento multimedia framework as well as a presentation by Emil Ivov talking about how Jitsi scales for high capacity video conferencing.

My presentation about the different options to run WebRTC on mobile devices was also presented on this day. More about that will be published here tomorrow.

The day concluded with the Paris WebRTC Meetup that featured 5 demos from the WebRTCfest and a live hackathon. Alan Quayle gives his review of this in his summary of the event. Although language barriers were well felt in some of the remote demos, there was one demo that demonstrated how easy it is to use WebRTC. The demo by Horus Lugo from Spain of Video Party required this 16 years old front-end developer to use the data channel for syncing a YouTube clip played on mobile phones of 2 users.

There were other cool things demonstrated where the main theme was Drones.

This included the cult answering machine that made a Drone fly and a hack that took place while demos were presented including developers from Parrot and volunteer developers from the audience that had a task to control the Parrot Jumping Sumo using WebRTC data channel.

 

Playing along this line, the demo of Vladimir from Mera presented in the data channel demo competition on day 3 featured control of an iPhone attached to an electric vehicle controlled from another iPhone using WebRTC data channel and display of the video from the controlled iPhone camera.

All these showed us that WebRTC technology has endless opportunities and applications. The sky is the limit as the Drones demonstrated to us.