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I'm giddy with excitement on what this could be used for.

Please correct me if I'm wrong:

Does this mean that when you chat with another person you are directly linked to them, making the communication more secure than say Skype (which passes the 'data' through Skype servers)?

5 comments

Where available it's a direct peer2peer connection... where not available it can use an intermediary server... end to end encryption is enabled though, so the in-between servers can't realistically view your data stream.

I think things like this are necessary to really get to a point where you can replace the last places Flash makes sense... I do hope development tooling catches up though.

Still.... need.... adoption.... on..... all..... clients. Killing off flash relies on the slowest chunk of the market getting its act together. I'm looking at you IE.

Client adoption isn't a problem any more, IE is declining to around 30% on most popular sites. The largest issue with killing flash is the legacy: video players, games, even carousels use it.

If omegle was released in the next months, it likely wouldn't use flash.

Well, there is still one use case where IE is indispensable:

http://www.bourkedesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/ie-po...

IE is only at 13% on Omegle. But I'd still hesitate to tell those users to get lost.

Lol... yea don't do that. But instead ask them politely :)

Fibs. The whole reason I'm using flash in my startup (and it is a major component atm) is because of IE share (and the relative immaturity of HTML5). Are you really telling me that you want to deny your service to a fresh install of windows?

While many people appreciate the benefit of better browsers there is still a significant portion that don't and hopping aboard this wagon prior to full adoption means that you exclude them or present roadblocks to them.

I have the added benefit of targeting (in part) the older generation with the software I produce making all this excitement muted without cross-browser consensus.

"Are you really telling me that you want to deny your service to a fresh install of windows?"

Does flash come pre-installed in Windows now? The last windows I used was XP, and it didn't come pre-installed in XP.

Out of interest, and not trying to be snarky, but do you have a solution in place for mobile as well?

If it we me and the choice was between supporting older browsers or supporting mobile, mobile would win out.

I think it depends strongly on your target market. If you're building B2B enterprise software used exclusively on PCs on a desk, in an office, with no remote access, the mobile might be less important.

thats a very narrow market me thinks?

also, the sort of enterprise you speak of would certainly not be purchasing software like these - they'd stick with the trusted and known big name vendors. As they say, nobody ever got fired for using IBM (or microsoft).

It's still a tricky choice though. By going with Flash you're tying yourself into a dying technology which may not be such a hot choice if you're building a business [1]

I'd still try to go with js/html and shim away as best I could for older IEs.

[1]http://swombat.com/2011/12/7/picking-technologies

Not yet mobile is the last crowd we're supporting. Our application is people that are going to die. You get me?

I work for a company whose target audience tends to be men over 65 years old... And we've seen mobile devices (specifically tablets) grow to nearly 17% of our traffic in the past two years.. I'd say mobile is critical, even more for seniors.

is for people*.

and yes, I'm putting it bluntly ;)

"people that are going to die" so it's aimed at.. everyone then? ;)

Just detect IE users and prompt them to download a plug-in.

Meanwhile, voice and video enable [your app] for the other 70% of your users.

Can argue that WebRTC is not really about universal calling regardless...and yet still a game-changer:

http://nextblitz.com/blog/webrtc-analysis/

From what i read on Ars, [0] IE seems to have something else called CU-RTC-Web a competitor that doesn't require SDP like webRTC does, an IE to chrome demoing it was given recently [1], from what Ars said it may be that WebRTC could run on CU-RTC-Web, hopefully that or we have two "standards"

[0] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/01/micros...

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/interoperability/archive/2013/01/17/...

We've just had a major codec battle about 2 years ago for HTML5 video, and I believe it still wasn't decided. Why would we go through that again? Especially when they want to add a proprietary codec to it.

Other CU-RTC-WEB aspects like the ones which focus on providing more customization as to how the network transport is handled could be integrated with WebRTC, this would allow more control over how the media is handled in transport, CU-RTC-WEB doesn't specify which codec to use so the final standard might as well just choose webM and opus.

Still need directory services too. That problem isn't going away...

Does it mean that the Microsoft acquisition was a bad decision? it seems like a lot of features end in the browser.

Microsoft & Skype are hard at work on a competitor to WebRTC, and don't appear to have any plans to support this - they seem in favour of moving VoIP to the browser, but they're going to do it in a Microsoft-y way.

And of course, the Skype acquisition was purchasing marketshare, not technology.

I wouldn't be surprised if this particular development was in part spurred on by Microsoft being able to say "look, none of the WebRTC clients interoperate, so we might as well create our own standard."

This might force Skype to move into the browser. Sort of how Spotify can be launched from the web, users will be able to call from inside the browser via a bridge plugin as long as Skype is running in the background.

That's still a losing proposition in the long term, again the plugin-free WebRTC. Imagine everything else besides Skype works through WebRTC.

The value in skype comes from:

Directory services Calling out to external services, e.g. cell phones (The value for yesterday's users) Skype integration with devices like cell phones (the value for tomorrow's users)

WebRTC doesn't really get you anywhere on these 3 fronts on it's own. What it does is commoditise the voice traffic component of Skype, something they really haven't cared about for years.

I thought that MS was pushing some form of WebRTC to get Skype working in the browser?

Yeah, some proprietary form of WebRTC, though. You know Microsoft...

You can already do this with Skype through Facebook.

Depends how much hardware continues to remain on most machines. If the market eventually shifts towards dumber and dumber boxes (as people keep predicting) that centralised model will still be sweet for performing things like encoding.

Remote encoding of VoIP doesn't make much sense, especially if the V is video. Processing power will be cheaper than bandwidth for a long time when you're talking about this much data (CD quality mono audio: 700kbits/s, 720p30 4:2:0 video: 332mbits/s).

There is probably still going to be a need for a centralized server to see who is/isn't online.

Hopefully more features do end up in the browser and not within the walled gardens of Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

Yes, although a relay (TURN) server can still be needed if a direct connection cannot be established (mobile connections etc). Its pretty easy to hook as well, we should see some some great apps come out of it, especially when data channels are fully supported.

I wonder if this eliminates the need for ZRTP on video calls, or are there situations where it can still be used to protect the user's privacy? Will we see WebRTC with ZRTP eventually?

Not to sideswipe your comment, but this piece is a really great overview and analysis of ZRTP: http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/11/lets-talk-ab...

Tent.io could do some cool stuff with this...

I think a lot of companies can do some cool stuff with this