WebRTC is a Bit More Interesting Than I Thought

WebRTC is not a technology I knew a lot about when I was in Microsoft’s Lync Engineering team. The Internet Explorer browser did not support WebRTC (it still doesn’t natively – you have to use the open source EasyRTC plugin), WebRTC looked too much like a Google contrivance, and from where I sat Ericsson Labs’ work on the concept implementation was a big unknown.

No big surprise if you think about it – Microsoft had a desktop client (Lync) it wanted the market to adopt and soon afterwards it added another desktop client (Skype) to its product portfolio. WebRTC seemed to be more of a distraction than an opportunity.

So when Claudio Vacalebre, one of the founders of Videotion, called this spring to talk about their WebRTC implementation I was interested in a reluctant sort of way because I had heard enough about WebRTC that I wanted to see it but not so much that I wanted to do a lot of homework on it.

Frankly, what Claudio showed me (via a pretty high-quality WebRTC video chat over Chrome) was pretty impressive – all the more so because he explained that what he showed me he had gotten up and running in a hosted VM in hours as opposed to days or weeks. I started thinking about the possibilities and decided to try it myself. I spun up AWS and Azure on free trial accounts and deployed WebRTC on both. Long story short, it worked pretty well on AWS and I couldn’t quite get it to work right on Azure (but I could easily put that one on me rather than Microsoft as I had a steeper learning curve with Azure). Bottom line – it was pretty easy to setup and deploy – Claudio was right. But it still felt a little bit gimmicky to me given all the rigor of Lync or Skype.

Why tell this story?

Last month’s WebRTC Conference in Atlanta (see https://www.webrtcworld.com/conference/east/presentations-atlanta14.aspx for the presentations) shows that there is a lot more intellectual horsepower and investment dollars going into WebRTC than before and the gimmick feels more like opportunity now. I wasn’t able to attend but looking through the presentations it seems like the Telco perspective was well-represented and that is promising. But I didn’t see a lot of energy from web developers or start-ups that might be able to explosively leverage WebRTC and that is troubling.

So WebRTC is not quite there yet. But if WebRTC can attract the developers it looks poised to explode – and that is interesting indeed. I know our UCStrategies colleague Tsahi Levent-Levi sometimes seems like the lonely prophet in the wilderness on WebRTC but I am now beginning to believe that he is on to something. But I would like to see more out of the WebRTC community about how they are going to get the attention of web developers.

What do you think – is WebRTC ready for prime-time?

2 Responses to "WebRTC is a Bit More Interesting Than I Thought" - Add Yours

Roberta J. Fox 7/16/2014 8:57:17 AM

Joseph: I echo your comments about the possibilities of WebRTC being in early adopter. From a 'getting there' perspective, I participated in a video collaboration meeting with a provincial government client last month. I was presenting our thoughts on where UC apps and the industry as a whole is going. What was interesting was the fact that the 20+ people were on every different type of device and app, and yet they were all able to see my presentation and/or me. The user interface as a presented was limited (I could either see the deck or see myself, but not both)....but net is that we were able to all communicate across devices, time and place.

This experience truly helped me understand the possibilities that WebRTC can offer, and I look forward to monitoring and playing with the technologies as they evolve.

Kevin Kieller 7/29/2014 8:33:11 PM

A good honest summary Joseph.

I really do want WebRTC to succeed. And I absolutely believe that getting developers and the larger base of web developers thinking about new communication solutions with WebRTC will create some interesting things. This is where I agree with Tsahi.

And yet, while hoping for the best, I still have a huge problem with the over-hyping of WebRTC.

WebRTC needs to do things better, cheaper or faster or things I cannot do with other technologies to get my interest. Avoiding a 60 second download does not create an adequate value proposition in my opinion.

And, I can currently invite almost anyone I want to join a Lync conference including voice, video, web conferencing and desktop sharing regardless of what OS, what device or what browser they are using. As you know Lync 2013 greatly expands the reach with the Lync mobile client and the Lync Web App (browser-based client). I think perhaps the "threat" of WebRTC succeeded in pushing the Lync team; however, Lync still provides a greater, higher-fidelity reach than most WebRTC solutions. And it is not only Lync, there are other app-based solutions that similarly support almost every conceivable platform. Running in a browser is not in itself a value prop -- please listen up WebRTC advocates.