The Battle Of New Industry Standards: Is WebRTC Making Zoom Redundant?

In the last couple of years, the way people and businesses communicate and collaborate has changed significantly. At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, video conference calls evolved as the go-to way for business communication. A Gartner report confirms, by 2024, only 25% of meetings will take place in person, down from 60% today (source).  Marketsandmarkets, a leading tech consulting firm, also confirms this trend, it says that the global video conferencing market size will grow to the tune of US$ 22.5 billion by 2026 with a 19.7% CAGR growth rate (source). However, this also intensified the clash for dominance between different between Zoom and WebRTC based tech players.

To cater to the growing needs for new-age video conferencing solutions, there is an increased focus on new industry standards. As a result, WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) has become the latest web standard. Integrating real-time communication capabilities through the web browser, WebRTC makes click-to-start meetings possible without downloading any dedicated app or plug-in. Moreover, it has taken over the conventional approach of using proprietary signaling and infrastructure as deployed by platforms like Zoom to battle over standards and codecs in the early phase. Let us examine how WebRTC does this.

The Most Comprehensive Guide on WebRTC

WebRTC or Web Real-Time Communications, though a relatively new web technology, has taken web-based communication at an entirely new level with the promise of heralding into a brave new world of communication on the horizon. The free, open-source WebRTC project makes use of a set of JavaScript APIs to facilitate peer-to-peer communication between web browsers and different devices. The question remains what makes it so popular.

A big draw with WebRTC is it eliminates the use of plugins or third-party software to facilitate real-time communication, helping achieve the ultimate goal of moving in a plugin-free world.

Quick Start WebRTC with Infobip

Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) has fast become the de facto framework used for building applications to facilitate audio and video communication over the web. WebRTC connects users through their browsers or on their mobile devices. In this post, we’ll get you up to speed on why WebRTC is so widely adopted for development today. Along the way, we’ll use Infobip’s set of SDKs to get quickly get started.

Let’s begin by diving a bit deeper into the details and history of WebRTC.

Know These Risks Before You Dive Into WebRTC

WebRTC is changing the way we live by establishing new norms in communication. WebRTC makes this possible by supporting real-time browser-to-browser communication without additional plugins. It provides peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and streaming of P2P audio and video calls. And all these are done by incorporating real-time communication directly in the end user’s browser. 

Security Measures Implemented by WebRTC

So, now that this technology is selling like hotcakes, you might be tempted to dig into it. However, it would be advisable to first understand the risks and threats that come with it. The good news is that most of these risks could be mitigated, and this article helps you with it.

What Is WebRTC?

WebRTC stands for web real-time communications. It is a very exciting, powerful, and highly disruptive cutting-edge technology and standard. WebRTC leverages a set of plugin-free APIs that can be used in both desktop and mobile browsers and is progressively becoming supported by all major modern browser vendors. Previously, external plugins were required in order to achieve similar functionality as is offered by WebRTC.

WebRTC leverages multiple standards and protocols, most of which will be discussed in this article. These include data streams, STUN/TURN servers, signaling, JSEP, ICE, SIP, SDP, NAT, UDP/TCP, network sockets, and more.

WebRTC Use Cases, Challenges, and Trends

What is WebRTC?

An open-source project released by Google in 2011, WebRTC provides API-based communication between web browsers and mobile applications, including transmissions of audio, video, and data. Eliminating the need for native plugins and app installations makes these connections user-friendly and supported by all the major browsers and mobile operating systems.

The adoption of WebRTC in the tech community has grown dramatically in the past few years. Facebook, Amazon, and Google are among the significant technology companies that implemented WebRTC to make their web applications faster, reliable, and more secure.

What Is Transcoding? Why Is Transcoding Important for Streaming?

If you are in the streaming industry or have some interest, you may have heard the word transcoding a lot. You may know a little about what transcoding is, or you may be wondering what this word you hear all the time. However, regardless of your situation, after this blog post, you will have full control of the transcoding process. Let’s not forget that the video transcoding process is very important for live broadcasts, especially if you want to use adaptive streaming in live streams to reach more audiences. We will find an answer to the question of what is transcoding.

But… To really understand what transcoding is and how it affects the success of your streams, firstly, we need to talk about encoding and need to understand what encoding is. We cannot talk about transcoding without talking about encoding.