The Past

The need to connect virtually and have video conferences and communications on the web has been around for a while. In the past, Flash was one of the popular ways to achieve this. The alternate to this was plug-ins or an installable application on the PC. From a user’s perspective, all these methods required additional installations. From a developer’s perspective, they had to study complex stack and protocols.

The birth of WebRTC

WebRTC technology was first developed by Global IP Solutions (or GIPS), a company founded around 1999 in Sweden. In 2011 GIPS was acquired by Google and the W3C started to work on a standard for WebRTC. Since then Google and other major players in the web-browser market, such as Mozilla and Opera, have been showing great support for WebRTC.

The newly formed Chrome WebRTC team focused on open sourcing all the low level RTC components such as codecs and echo cancellation techniques. The team added an additional layer – a JavaScript API as an integration layer to web browsers. By combining these audio and video components with a JS interface, this spurred innovation in the RTC market.

A few lines of JS code and no licensing, integration of components or deep knowledge of RTC!

WebRTC – A Standard

WebRTC is a standard for real-time, plugin-free video, audio and data communication maintained by –

• IETF – defines the formats and protocols used to communicate between browsers
• W3C – defines the APIs that a Web application can use to control this communication

WebRTC is a standard that has different implementations

WebRTC is a standard that has different implementations, such as OpenWebRTC and webrtc.org. The initial version of the OpenWebRTC implementation was developed internally at Ericsson Research. The latter is maintained by the Google Chrome team.

Cover image for this post is from here.