let's talk about Real Time Communication on the Web (RTCWeb).
What is it?
- Technical answer: it's about enabling to establish and manage a real time RTP stream using native browser functionality controlled by JavaScript.
- In a less encrypted text: You can setup a multimedia (audio/video/chat) connection in Internet (no further cost in addition to your data plan) using a browser, without any further software installation or configuration, just surfing to same site offering this function.
- For further technical details, take a look at:
- IETF RTCWeb Working Group
- W3C Working Group
- RTCWeb Google project (named WebRTC) and WebRTC site - Google launched the idea and is driving it
- WebRTC at MozillaWiki - Mozilla is also quite active
- Tutorial on the html5rocks site
- Microsoft / Skype
- Telecom equipment manufacturers (mainly Ericsson)
- Telecom Operators like Deutsche Telekom. Telefonica deserves a special mention, as they launched the openwebdevice initiative at MWC2012, which is not exactly RTCWeb but it comes conceptually and in terms of business impact very close to it. I will cover this in another post.
- VoIP providers like tropo.
- many other players popup everyday: my list is obviously incomplete, but if you start with the links above you should get at least 90% of the whole picture.
- Obviously you should follow the Google project group in Google+
Since you can read everywhere how WebRTC (or its standardization named RTCWeb) works, I won't try to explain it again. I wound rather address another question: why RTCWeb is going to be disruptive?
What's new?
Everybody knows Skype. RTCWeb allows almost the same functionality (e.g. multimedia communication on a computer or a mobile phone), except the fact that Skype is a software to be downloaded, installed and configured. The key point is that now you can do the same in a browser window, just surfing in Internet as you usually do.Moreover, though not very commonly known, there are ways to have multimedia communication in browser, but, again, they all require some plug-in (e.g. a software to be installed and downloaded).
You may argue that RTCWeb is not very different and that there is little end-user benefit.
In my view, if you think to implement the same Skype functionality using RTCWeb (say, a browser version of Skype, which by the way won't be new), you maybe right. But the disruptive potential of RTCWeb won't be exploited and this is not the purpose of introducing RTCWeb.
