Apple Jumps on the WebRTC Bandwagon

http://www.nojitter.com/post/240171589/apple-jumps-on-the-webrtc-bandwagon

by blaccspotmedia • 10 years ago

273 123 10 years ago

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jaxondu• 10 years ago

What are some of the notable startups in WebRTC space?

xuejie• 10 years ago

I think Talky(https://talky.io/) is a pioneer here.

fitzwatermellow2• 10 years ago

talky.io is great!

LinkDJ• 10 years ago

I wanted to like Talky but I tried having a large group conversation there (10-12 people) and it was laggy, some people couldn't see other people, and other people would drop from the call randomly. A few of us had fiber connections but it didn't seem to make any difference on the connection quality or reliability. We had to move to Hangouts just to be able to hear and see each other clearly.

grahamel• 10 years ago

appear.in use it

fitzwatermellow2• 10 years ago

I also use PeerJS which is free up to 50 concurrent users or so...

http://peerjs.com/

blaccspotmedia3• 10 years ago

SnapChat, Facebook, WhatsApp, Tango, Amazon are a few you probably heard of :-)

meddlepal2• 10 years ago

TIL: SnapChat, Facebook, WhatsApp and Amazon are startups.

strife25• 10 years ago

Just looking at startups is not enough to evaluate the impact of WebRTC. Call center tech companies worth their chop have been working with this tech for a while now as it will save money and lower the barrier of entry for their customers.

The other companies paying attention to this are the chat companies/products (slack, hipchat, etc.) - having really simple reliable calling and videochat in their products is going to be a competitive feature going forward.

joeyspn2• 10 years ago

Startups 100% focused on WebRTC? not many as per startup/high growth definition... The question is tricky, but I'd say that some of the startups using WebRTC as a key part of their offer are: Twilio, Tokbox, Plivo, Tropo, Slack....

ex3ndr• 10 years ago

We (actor.im) are using WebRTC for voice/video calls

nichol4s2• 10 years ago

We use it at https://www.surfly.com to add videochat to our co-browsing solution.

We do notice however, that the quality and performance of current webrtc videochat depends a lot on different conditions and we believe that it is still somewhat early for a robust experience all around. This will hopefully change when new codecs become mainstream.

A lot of our current clients are attracted by the videochat option, but in practice just use our co-browsing solution combined with a phone call. It is just very annoying if you want to give a remote product demo to a prospect and you'll need to spend time debugging audio/video issue's.

Trufa• 10 years ago

Offtopic, but you where hiring some time ago right, front end devs? Still are? Or did I get confused?

zanny• 10 years ago

vector.im and the Matrix protocol in general uses webrtc for the audio / visual calling part of a messaging protocol. It has additional functionality baked into Matrix itself for the signaling part.

jamesblonde• 10 years ago

www.hivestreaming.com

Streaming video internally at large enterprises (facebook, ericsson, aol). Things like CEO monthly video calls, etc.

svetliod• 10 years ago

Viblast (viblast.com/pdn/enterprise) and Streamroot do the same!

dahart2• 10 years ago

I use appear.in every day. 1-click video chat with no account sign up. The ease of launching is what keeps me coming back, even though it seems a little buggy now and then (which might be the early WebRTC support, who knows).

coetry2• 10 years ago

I actually used this a couple days ago for an interview. Cool stuff. The UI needs work, but functionality wise, really impressive. The quality was great and there were 3 people on the call. I'm not sure how it'll handle much more than that, but it worked great without any hiccups.

GFischer4• 10 years ago

As many said before, there are lots of startups using WebRTC.

Startups whose core value proposition includes WebRTC might be most of those doing live video customer service, like http://liveninja.com/

Y Combinator had a few in the last batches, like http://www.breakoutroom.co/

kwindla2• 10 years ago

We just launched a hardware video conferencing device that uses WebRTC. https://pluot.co

We route all media streams peer-to-peer. Which gives you the lowest possible latency and highest possible quality on a decent network connection. But, as other comments here have said, using a mesh topology has the downside of degrading badly if you have more than four (or so) participants in a call.

We'll add bridging in a future release, to support larger meetings, but it's actually fairly difficult to make a "routing media through the cloud in real time" architecture rock solid -- high quality and reliable for everyone, all the time. We've got customers in eight countries, so far, for example. So we'll need servers in multiple data centers, but somebody on an international call will always be farther from the bridge than is ideal.

We've surveyed a lot of people about video conferencing, and there's a lot of dissatisfaction with Hangouts and other similar products, much of which comes down to call quality, much of which is attributable to the difficulty of bouncing media streams through centralized servers.

We were in the most recent YC batch (W16) and a bunch of YC companies use our stuff. The basic idea is that big screens are super useful for team meetings, engineering standups, customer demos, etc. But big-screen video conferencing hardware has always been really expensive, or something you have to cobble together yourself. We're turnkey, set up in five minutes, are super easy to use, designed for getting real work done, and the hardware is free. You just pay $50/month per room, and there's no commitment (you can send us back the hardware and cancel any time).

You can try the Chrome browser version of our call stack from any laptop/desktop: https://pluot.co/new -- that bounces your browser to a new, unique, permanent meeting URL.

We've been following the Apple WebRTC development for a while, because we'd love to support Safari with no plugins, just like we can Chrome. We're hoping for full mobile WebKit support, too.

dougwbrunton• 10 years ago

(other Pluot co-founder here)

Leaning on the Google WebRTC stack for the software that runs on the Pluot hardware device has been fun and interesting. We wrap Chromium (via Electron nee Atom Shell) with a UI designed to take full advantage of the HD TV (or two TV's) pixels and a provide one-click meeting start via any browser that has been paired with the room as a remote control using code displayed on the TV.

The web client uses largely the same code as the hardware device to perform its call machinery and screen shares.

We'll try to write more about this in the days to come, this week we're turning screwdrivers in the garage to ship orders, and updating the web layouts to be consistent with the in-room experience.

secure• 10 years ago

We're turnkey, set up in five minutes, are super easy to use, designed for getting real work done, and the hardware is free. You just pay $50/month per room, and there's no commitment (you can send us back the hardware and cancel any time).

So, am I understanding it correctly that your main distinction from Google’s Hangouts-based offering is the pricing model? See https://www.google.com/work/chrome/devices/for-meetings/ (800 USD one-time). I haven’t personally set it up (just used it a lot), so I’m not entirely sure if your statement “designed for getting real work done” implies that Google’s lacks in that regard…?

spb• 10 years ago

blab.im is starting to get popular.

gz5• 10 years ago

Apple could support H.265 with hardware acceleration, which would make this very interesting. Also will be instructive to see their specific choices on WebRTC/ORTC implementations.

danyork• 10 years ago

This is excellent news! Now we have all the major browser vendors committing to include WebRTC. I look forward to seeing this get implemented and deployed.

meddlepal2• 10 years ago

Anyone with more experience in this area know if WebRTC would be useful for building a distributed hash table? It looks like it isn't just for audio and video data.

joeyspn2• 10 years ago

Yes, there are already several implementations...

https://github.com/feross/webtorrent

https://github.com/feross/bittorrent-dht

https://bitbucket.org/vardump/webrtc-kademlia

etc...

agumonkey• 10 years ago

webtorrent homepage demo is so pleasing.

numerlo• 10 years ago

It's in development in WebKit, it has been for a long while (the author just noticed it now and went with the full-of-assumptions article for the ad money) and it means absolutely nothing. Yeah, it will probably (and hopefully) one day end up in Safari. On the other hand, it also wouldn't be the first time WebKit had a feature that Apple chose to disable, especially on iOS Safari.

joshdickson4• 10 years ago

This is correct. This is not new, it's been "in development" for months and it's been reflected in Webkit's public commit history for even longer.

Tweet from February from Google's WebRTC Project Director citing the change. [1]

It's definitely coming to desktop Safari. Doubtful we'll see it on mobile Safari, but fortunately on iOS, WebRTC support is already possible in-app.

[1] https://twitter.com/juberti/status/701482981647474688

mikeash• 10 years ago

What makes it doubtful that it'll make it to mobile Safari? (Not questioning it, just wondering.)

Kunlun3• 10 years ago

Very interesting. Still trying to find a way to stream audio back from the Safari browser to a local server. No luck so far, ang thoughts perhaps?

bsimpson• 10 years ago

Moreover, since it wasn't mentioned when Safari announced their version of Canary a couple weeks ago, I doubt we're getting WebRTC this year.

alwillis• 10 years ago

I wouldn't assume that. Since Safari Technology Preview is going to be updated every 2 weeks, as soon as WebRTC is stable enough, it'll be included in the Preview.

I'd be surprised if WebRTC isn't on the list to be a major feature of Safari in this fall's OS X 10.12 release, which will be previewed at June's WWDC.

rocky1138• 10 years ago

The last time this was on HN, we talked about how they had just one position they were hiring to do the work.

amelius• 10 years ago

Still dreaming of Apple opening up its FaceTime protocol, so that I can call my friends from within Linux.

skrowl2• 10 years ago

You know there are dozens of video chat apps that interoperate between OS X and Linux, right? Try Google Hangouts, ooVoo, or Skype.

nxzero• 10 years ago

Point is FaceTime is a native app and if it was possible to interface with it, developers would do so.

ino• 10 years ago

I'm not willing to install another browser plugin to enable video chat anymore.

Until video chat works without plugins I'm using the standalone apps.

I know chrome bundles the hangouts plugin. I wish it didn't and worked without plugins.

dahart2• 10 years ago

That sounds really presumptuous, since chances are high @amelius knows about the alternatives, and since it's still a great point even with the alternatives; if I want to use Linux, great, good for me, but I'm not going to walk around trying to convince all my friends & family that are happily using FaceTime to switch to something that requires an installation, is harder to use, and is not integrated with the calling features of their devices.

AndrewUnmuted• 10 years ago

None of your examples deliver sound quality that comes anywhere near that of FaceTime Audio.

mseri• 10 years ago

Yes, but FaceTime use of bandwidth is an order of magnitude smaller...

In additino, Skype is not updated in Linux since ages

aljones• 10 years ago

Probably never happening. The protocol became a moving target because of patent suits, and made to rely upon Apple servers to a much greater extent.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-pate...

http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/04/apple-ordered-to-pay-625m-t...

curt15• 10 years ago

Didn't Google recently start making hangouts calls use peer to peer connections?http://9to5google.com/2016/02/04/hangouts-improved-peer-to-p... What do they do differently from what Apple did initially?

simonh• 10 years ago

They can't. It uses a bunch of technologies they licensed, but which they have no rights to open up for others to implement. Apparently when he made the announcement Steve Jobs thought that it was all based on open technology, but the licensing turned out to be a can of worms.

CountHackulus• 10 years ago

It's not a bandwagon, it's an important web standard for HTML5 game developers who don't want to be stuck with TCP.

cpncrunch3• 10 years ago

WebRTC can be used with TCP or UDP, so that's really beside the point. I'm waiting for WebRTC on Safari, but I use TCP exclusively for a number of reasons. (I transmit the data myself, and don't use PeerConnections).

cpncrunch3• 10 years ago

Why are people downvoting a fact?

edit it looks like I misread the OP's comment, but it would have been more useful to comment than to downvote.

diafygi2• 10 years ago

Reminder: WebRTC data channels can silently leak your internal and (if behind a VPN) real IP address.

https://diafygi.github.io/webrtc-ips/

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=959893

upofadown• 10 years ago

The important issue is that some WebRTC capable browsers can leak your internal address to a random page you are visiting even if you are not using WebRTC. If you are actually using WebRTC then you probably don't care if they know what your internal IP address is. ... that is of course if you ever care...

Someone12342• 10 years ago

That's why site-based VPNing is considered the gold standard. Instead of using a VPN client on a PC, you use a network appliance, that way the PC never has a concept of what your "true" IP is. Thus cannot leak it.

Some people have been toying with doing the same but using Virtual Machines. The VM wouldn't have a concept of what the true IP is and since everything goes through the virtual router it acts like a site-to-site VPN connection hiding your true address.

SCHiM2• 10 years ago

Yes. This is very easy to install using PFsense inside a virtual machine.

Here's a guide that is recent and I can confirm that it works:

http://www.malwaretech.com/2015/08/creating-ultimate-tor-vir...

athenot2• 10 years ago

Which is great on a desktop or a home office situation. That's what I have. But for mobile situation where it's just your phone and the telco, that is not an option (unless you're in the habit of carrying a suitcase with your appliance).

vox_mollis• 10 years ago

The problem with this is that the VAST majority of endpoint appliances don't support OpenVPN. You're limited to PPTP, L2TP, or IPSec with pretty much every single vendor.

api2• 10 years ago

If internal IPS are critical security info, something is very wrong.

biggerfisch2• 10 years ago

Well, imagine you're in a controlled environment (eg, China) and having your non-vpn IP leaked could compromise your identity. Having an easy way for a site to reveal you is therefore a security issue.

cptskippy3• 10 years ago

Yeah, I'm struggling to understand why that's an issue.

tezza2• 10 years ago

? I browse from work.

And I'm fairly sure my Sys Admin won't want random websites knowing my internal IP address.

Network shares etc. would likely be somewhere on the same range and they could launch subsequent attacks to try to sniff confidential documents and resources.

danjoc• 10 years ago

This demo secretly makes requests to STUN servers that can log your request. These requests do not show up in developer consoles and cannot be blocked by browser plugins (AdBlock, Ghostery, etc.).

That's a bit of an overstatement. Running NoScript. No scripts, no WebRTC.

stcredzero• 10 years ago

Reminder: WebRTC data channels can silently leak your internal and (if behind a VPN) real IP address.

I have been writing an MMO server, and I would be glad to use WebRTC datachannels, but only for client-server communications. I am far more interested in UDP-like semantics than peer to peer.

JoeAltmaier• 10 years ago

Isn't this a non-issue? Security by obscurity is weak. Not just a WebRTC issue: any p2p communication will do this. With IPV6 its a non-issue as well?

andrewvijay• 10 years ago

They are late as usual!

falcolas• 10 years ago

The RFC is still a draft [0]; I wouldn't call this late, I'd call it waiting for a standard to settle. As a developer, I hate chasing ever-updating requirements, and as a user, I prefer stability and speed over shiny new features.

[0] https://w3c.github.io/webrtc-pc/

coetry2• 10 years ago

finally.

But seriously, great news. I've been spending a lot of time with WebRTC and this news truly made my day. I'm an Apple fan, they just need to do better adopting standards and making developers happy.

GFischer4• 10 years ago

This is huge for many of us working with WebRTC for video (or audio), because the only way for Safari users to have the same experience as other browsers was through a plugin.

By closing this gap, you can have the same experience for 99% of desktop users. iOS will stil require a native app (I really, really, really hope they will implement it there next).

The use case I'm working with is embedding video as part of live support for retail, and we're looking at doing more than that.

Why does it matter: my personal belief is that WebRTC might be an important enabling technology for VR or AR-based shopping experiences (We actually applied to Y Combinator with that, but got rejected).

HappyTypist• 10 years ago

VR and AR is overhyped.

GFischer4• 10 years ago

Maybe... I'm really excited for Microsoft's HoloLens, for example.

Pretty certain they're still a couple of years from mainstream adoption though, but I can certainly envision lots of business uses.

Kunlun3• 10 years ago

Sweet. Any documentation to point at? I am trying to stream the microphone of my iPhone through Safari and could not find any compelling way to do so, with plugins or anything else.

GFischer4• 10 years ago

I don't think you can stream iPhone's microphone from Safari with WebRTC.

The plugin I mentioned is http://skylink.io/plugin/ , but it only works for Safari on Mac.

You'll need to build a native app

https://webrtc.org/native-code/ios/

or try Bowser

http://www.openwebrtc.org/bowser/

(I haven't yet).

jlouazel• 10 years ago

Finally Apple has taken the plunge! This is good news for companies which are based on WebRTC such as the one I work for. This will give us more work but we couldn't stand the wait any longer for this release! Today is a good day!

shmerl• 10 years ago

So Opus support is coming? Apple for long opposed free codecs.

cptskippy3• 10 years ago

Probably not. Apple only joined after Chrome started supporting H.264. Without Chrome support for H.264, Apple would have had to support VP8 to be inter-operable with Chrome.

50CNT2• 10 years ago

Legitimate question, outside of WebRTC, plugins which are icky, and Flash which I hope dies a fiery death in a chlorine triflouride fire, is there any other options for doing browser based audio and video chat? It'd be cool to know of alternatives.

Rhetorical follow up, if it's the only wagon in town that doesn't either require you to maintain several different plugins for several different browsers (plus having users install them), or doesn't run on my OS (Thanks Adoma/be), how is it a bandwagon instead of a future standard? That makes about as much sense to me as talking about the CSS bandwagon, or the http bandwagon, or the TCIP bandwagon.

peyton• 10 years ago

how is it a bandwagon instead of a future standard

Not saying I subscribe, but there's a view that a web browser should be for browsing web documents, not peer to peer video. There are limited development resources, and some feel those should be allocated to making web browsing faster and more power-efficient, rather than making a new networking platform and dealing with all the performance, compatibility, and security work that entails.

50CNT2• 10 years ago

There's the cynic in me who thinks that the year of the linux desktop is when everything runs in the browser anyway. After switching away from windows, proper web clients have been a godsend for those programs that think: "linux port, lol nope". Considering I'm working in China right now and there's a sizeable population still running XP, that's happened quite a bit. Anything that makes that easier to do is a win in my book.

If I wanted to spartanly text browse the web, I'll point emacs at an URL. Not gonna waste cycles on all those silly stylesheets.

extra88• 10 years ago

Safari and IE don't support the Stream API either, that's the more critical piece you need to get pluginless video into the browser. Without WebRTC, you could still do server-mediated audio/video chat but access to the webcam and microphone hardware is a prerequisite.

tkubacki• 10 years ago

I hope this wave will kill Skype (or Skype will adpot WebRTC)

Thaxll• 10 years ago

Reminds me video games, p2p is cheaper since you don't have to host your gameservers, but p2p lags hard and enabled a lot of "cheats" and so on... Plus you have to manage network issues like unpn / NAT ect..

oandrei2• 10 years ago

STUN server is not a real solution. It is typically unable to penetrate NAT. Maybe WebRTC will work sometimes, but it is not a reliable solution. It is difficult to come up with alternative to Skype until IPv6 is widely adopted. But when we get IPv6, every computer will have its own address, then yes.

yomism• 10 years ago

So use a TURN server.

TL;DR: Does the same as STUN but also is able to relay video & audio for hosts where STUN fails.

I'm using it in a Android app of mine for video conference and works really good. You can download something like coturn and drop it in a 5$ digitalocean and run with it.

It works for me.

nroets• 10 years ago

If STUN does not work, it tries TURN. If TURN does not work, you're not connected to the Internet.

https://www.webrtc-experiment.com/docs/STUN-or-TURN.html

abvdasker• 10 years ago

Though I agree with you that IPv6 will be a boon to P2P networking, your statement is mostly incorrect. STUN can penetrate the most common types of NAT including full-cone, restricted-cone and port-restricted-cone[1]. As the other comments note, TURN can almost always get the job done with other NAT configurations.

The WebRTC API is actually surprisingly robust. It was built with these limitations in mind, so client code can supply a list of STUN and TURN servers, which the ICE framework underpinning WebRTC uses in the order they were supplied. So if setup correctly, WebRTC clients can use TURN as a backup when STUN isn't enough.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN#Limitations

oandrei2• 10 years ago

Here in Brazil, all NATs are either defective or ``symmetric'' whatever this means I am not an expert sorry. I do not expect STUN to work. As for TURN, this means traffic will go through the server. Then how is it better than Skype? Microsoft can afford, if I understand it correctly, a huge network of TURN servers, essentially. Is this how Skype works?

erikpukinskis• 10 years ago

The gods have smiled on us! They allow us to continue to work on their land!

Apple Jumps on the WebRTC Bandwagon

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