While it is still a little tricky for normal humans to use, WebRTC interoperability between Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome has been demonstrated – and it has some pretty amazing capabilities. Audio / Video conferencing, chat, multi-person conferences, and even screen, application sharing and even encryption! While OTT companies like Skype have been offering similar proprietary solutions for some time, this is going to be game changing because this is an open source standard that will be a part of HTML5 – and any to any interworking will be the result of the standards activities.
You can see some of the compelling capabilities in the Mozilla / Google interoperability web-vertisement – http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MsAWR_rJ5n8. While the mainstream availability of this technology – and applications that support it – are still on the way, I have played around on the web and found a few sites where it is possible to get an advanced taste of this integrated capability. At AddLive, http://demo.addlive.com/FOWJ, you can set up a multi person conference and try out all the features, including the screen and application sharing. I actually had some echo problems there, but the proof of concept was clear.
But, why do I find this so exciting? This revolutionary because video / voice / messaging / remote conferencing all changes with this. While Mozilla and Google are demonstrating interoperability, the likes of Cisco, Avaya, Siemens and others are also active in the WebRTC standards process. And, while Microsoft has proposed an alternative solution, it has offered this technology to the standards body as well. So far Apple is silent on this, but it seems clear that the cat is out of the bag, and everyone is going to have to join the game. So, in the near future – if you have the IP bandwidth, you will be able to communicate in multi-media with anyone, and multi-person conferences will be a breeze. And, because this technology will be in the open source domain, we will doubtlessly see dozens of apps appearing. Personal communications, business to business and business to consumer transactions soon be changing dramatically. This will be very exciting to see, and, I expect, very enriching to use. I also suspect that as the apps emerge, we will see that the early demonstrations we are now seeing are just the tip of the iceberg.
While this is a little out of keeping with my normal blogging material, it is so interesting that I wanted to spread the word – the WebRTC revolution is on the way! I love this kind of game changing innovation.
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