June 30, 2023
Comments Off on WebRTC.ventures Visits CommCon 2023

This year, WebRTC.ventures had the pleasure to both sponsor and attend CommCon 2023. The CommCon conference is a premier open source media conference where you can learn about the latest in WebRTC and Open Media, network with industry experts, and enjoy four immersive days of community and connections in the north of England. We couldn’t miss out on #CommCon2023!

Due to personal reasons, I couldn’t be there the first day. Luckily the talks were recorded, so I look forward to catching up on what I missed. You can, too, with the purchase of an on-demand ticket.

Here’s some of the talks I was lucky enough to catch online or in person:

The History of The Future of Communications

The second day of the conference started with tech industry icon and VoIP pioneer, Jeff Pulver. His presentation was based on the premise of looking back from 2033 about what happened/will happen in telecom over the next 10 years due to advances in AI, Chatbots, 6G and Blockchain. Jeff also recounted his own amazing experiences from being a part of the invention of VoIP to the co-founding of Vonage. He articulated that prediction of the future is not as important as living in the present. The future is unbounded and we need to dream big!

Immersive Interoperable Worlds to Build In

Later, I watched a very interesting presentation from Matthew Hodgson, CTO/COO of Element and Technical Co-founder of the not-for-profit open source project Matrix.org. His talk was titled Immersive Interoperable Worlds to Build In. 

Although there is a wide ecosystem of services they have built, he continued with MatrixRTC (a RTC signaling over Matrix) but the talk was mostly focused on Third Room, their decentralized platform for spatial collaboration in AR/VR.

Third Room is web first, leverages MatrixRTC and everything runs on gITF and WASM (or JS) scripts. A lot of use case examples were mentioned like:

  • Telepresence 
  • Virtual socializing – simply hang out with your friends online in a 3D environment
  • Art and Music – jam on a virtual Bosendorfer, or warble on a virtual theremin…
  • Gaming 
  • Disaster management – visualize flooding zones or location of airplanes
  • Education – learn physics in a virtual lab

WebRTC & Video Delivery Application Security – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

That same day, Sandro Gauci (also a recent speaker on our series, WebRTC Live), gave a great talk based on the experience his team at Enable Security GmbH gained through security testing of WebRTC applications, with anecdotal stories to illustrate how the applications and infrastructure that handle WebRTC can be attacked. He also shared what can go wrong with video delivery mechanisms such as RIST and SRT.

Telcos and the Rush for 5G Gold

Evan McGee, CTO and Founder of SignalWire and CEO of the new AI audio company Everlit, gave an insightful talk on the shape of telcos in the 2020s and their imminent evolution. He helped us better understand how telcos, the gatekeepers of consumer communication, are embracing transformative technologies like ChatGPT to revolutionize industries. 

The Challenges of Hybrid Meetings

Events and meetings have undergone a multitude of changes in the past few years. Lorenzo Miniero shared how Meetecho, RTC-experts and authors of the Janus WebRTC server, handled the first change to fully virtual participation, and then what is now moving towards a more seamless interaction between many on-site participants, and possibly as many remote participants as well. (Lorenzo spoke about many of the same topics on WebRTC Live late last year.)


Representation of Meetecho’s real time streaming solution high level logic. We can see how a listener can be brought in as a guest and publish audio that will be mixed in the audio bridge for all the participants.

Time out for some fun at Blackpool!

Wednesday arrived and we were able to finally let people know where we were going for the secret road trip that WebRTC.ventures sponsored. It was the seaside resort, Blackpool! And we got custom candy and a meal for all the attendees:

Before we headed out, there were still great talks that day!

Building & Operating A Next-Gen Access Full-Fibre Network

An interesting and quite different topic was brought by Tom Rigg of B4RN, a community-led ISP based in Lancashire, UK. He talked about the transition from copper to fiber, creating a robust network from scratch. He manages a 400Gb low-latency dark fiber network, ensuring seamless connectivity.

B4RN operating network slide about what they do in the UK

Sub-Second Latency Streaming Technologies and Applications

Another interesting talk was by Winlin Yang, the founder and driving force behind the success of the SRS (Simple Realtime Server) project. His SRS talk highlighted a popular open-source project (https://github.com/ossrs/srs) with various use cases such as Unity streaming, SRT remote broadcasting, and audio AI processing. It offered low latency (<200ms) and addressed the cons of WebRTC like encryption and UDP performance. Winlin suggested potential changes including SPA/PPS, while promoting SRT for higher quality broadcasting as a replacement for RTMP.

Winlin Yang pointing out why RTMP and WebRTC is a better choice than LLHLS for real-world scenarios

Iron Man in Real Life: Exploring the Possibilities of our Voice and AI

Garrett Graves from Twitch’s talk featured a live demo of S.A.T.U.R.D.A.Y, a cutting-edge voice-controlled AI system resembling Tony Stark’s J.A.R.V.I.S. It showcases real-time audio-to-text translation, AI processing, and text-to-audio conversion during a WebRTC call. The demo highlighted applications in personal assistants, translation, and voice-activated devices. 

01.pnV W つ ヨ WO ヨ 0 0 亠 ↓ 亠 0 亠 0 ・ 、 明 ← / つ 0 ^ / ・ 乙 彡 み う 彡 ノ / を 一 亠 L-L5 ー ↓ → WOJ WO ヨ / 卆 0 ー 亠 5L-L WO ヨ の 勿 グ 勿 ・ s 0 / 01 ヤ ハ s 0 ノ s 0 。 → つ ヨ WO ヨ
Diagram of the current real time voice bot. Using Pion and webrtc.rs

An Everything but Technical View on AI and Telecom

The last talk of the day, at least for me, was by Mira Georgieva of Zoiper. She introduced the fears of AI – and the reasons why still to use AI – based on their experience with banafo.com and with a particular focus in telecom.

5+ years of React Native WebRTC

I was able to catch Saúl Ibarra Corretgé of 8×8’s talk on Thursday about how React Native has been powering Jitsi Meet and countless other applications for many years now. He discussed the story of their migration to a Unified Plan, and shared some WebRTC “war stories”.

We were certainly thankful to Saúl, as he also took time out of his day on Wednesday to appear live from CommCon on WebRTC Live for an episode on What’s Next for Jitsi and JaaS? 

Adventures in Real Time Observability with qryn

The last talk I was lucky enough to catch was by Alex Maitland of Gigapipe. Alex introduced a polyglot observability tool that can be used for RTC.

Alex Maitland talking about their Gigapipe observability service using QXIP open source products QXIP: Telecom Observability

Everything is better in a beautiful 700-year-old English country manor house with nice weather!

WebRTC technology continues to expand, witnessing the emergence of increasingly intricate use cases. This includes extensive integration with AI, advancements in VR/AR applications, and the ongoing exploration of improved methods for real-time broadcasting, telephony service interaction, and monitoring.

CommCon represents an exceptional platform to foster collaboration and encourage learning of RTC technology. Sponsoring these events is our way to thank and give a big shout-out to those who make the RTC community better by maintaining or contributing code, submitting issues, or even participating in surveys or joining these conferences to share their knowledge.

This year’s event featured exceptional presentations and networking that provided valuable insights and sparked engaging discussions. Dan Jenkins and his team did a tremendous job. I was so happy to attend!

While we are on the topic of experts …

Here at WebTC.ventures, we specialize in assessing, building, integrating, testing, and managing RTC applications. A lot of our work these days involve integration work with many of the amazing products highlighted at CommCon. If something here is of interest to you and you want to explore how it could work with your application, we’d love to help!

Recent Blog Posts

June 30, 2023
Comments Off on WebRTC.ventures Visits CommCon 2023

This year, WebRTC.ventures had the pleasure to both sponsor and attend CommCon 2023. The CommCon conference is a premier open source media conference where you can learn about the latest in WebRTC and Open Media, network with industry experts, and enjoy four immersive days of community and connections in the north of England. We couldn’t miss out on #CommCon2023!

Due to personal reasons, I couldn’t be there the first day. Luckily the talks were recorded, so I look forward to catching up on what I missed. You can, too, with the purchase of an on-demand ticket.

Here’s some of the talks I was lucky enough to catch online or in person:

The History of The Future of Communications

The second day of the conference started with tech industry icon and VoIP pioneer, Jeff Pulver. His presentation was based on the premise of looking back from 2033 about what happened/will happen in telecom over the next 10 years due to advances in AI, Chatbots, 6G and Blockchain. Jeff also recounted his own amazing experiences from being a part of the invention of VoIP to the co-founding of Vonage. He articulated that prediction of the future is not as important as living in the present. The future is unbounded and we need to dream big!

Immersive Interoperable Worlds to Build In

Later, I watched a very interesting presentation from Matthew Hodgson, CTO/COO of Element and Technical Co-founder of the not-for-profit open source project Matrix.org. His talk was titled Immersive Interoperable Worlds to Build In. 

Although there is a wide ecosystem of services they have built, he continued with MatrixRTC (a RTC signaling over Matrix) but the talk was mostly focused on Third Room, their decentralized platform for spatial collaboration in AR/VR.

Third Room is web first, leverages MatrixRTC and everything runs on gITF and WASM (or JS) scripts. A lot of use case examples were mentioned like:

  • Telepresence 
  • Virtual socializing – simply hang out with your friends online in a 3D environment
  • Art and Music – jam on a virtual Bosendorfer, or warble on a virtual theremin…
  • Gaming 
  • Disaster management – visualize flooding zones or location of airplanes
  • Education – learn physics in a virtual lab

WebRTC & Video Delivery Application Security – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

That same day, Sandro Gauci (also a recent speaker on our series, WebRTC Live), gave a great talk based on the experience his team at Enable Security GmbH gained through security testing of WebRTC applications, with anecdotal stories to illustrate how the applications and infrastructure that handle WebRTC can be attacked. He also shared what can go wrong with video delivery mechanisms such as RIST and SRT.

Telcos and the Rush for 5G Gold

Evan McGee, CTO and Founder of SignalWire and CEO of the new AI audio company Everlit, gave an insightful talk on the shape of telcos in the 2020s and their imminent evolution. He helped us better understand how telcos, the gatekeepers of consumer communication, are embracing transformative technologies like ChatGPT to revolutionize industries. 

The Challenges of Hybrid Meetings

Events and meetings have undergone a multitude of changes in the past few years. Lorenzo Miniero shared how Meetecho, RTC-experts and authors of the Janus WebRTC server, handled the first change to fully virtual participation, and then what is now moving towards a more seamless interaction between many on-site participants, and possibly as many remote participants as well. (Lorenzo spoke about many of the same topics on WebRTC Live late last year.)


Representation of Meetecho’s real time streaming solution high level logic. We can see how a listener can be brought in as a guest and publish audio that will be mixed in the audio bridge for all the participants.

Time out for some fun at Blackpool!

Wednesday arrived and we were able to finally let people know where we were going for the secret road trip that WebRTC.ventures sponsored. It was the seaside resort, Blackpool! And we got custom candy and a meal for all the attendees:

Before we headed out, there were still great talks that day!

Building & Operating A Next-Gen Access Full-Fibre Network

An interesting and quite different topic was brought by Tom Rigg of B4RN, a community-led ISP based in Lancashire, UK. He talked about the transition from copper to fiber, creating a robust network from scratch. He manages a 400Gb low-latency dark fiber network, ensuring seamless connectivity.

B4RN operating network slide about what they do in the UK

Sub-Second Latency Streaming Technologies and Applications

Another interesting talk was by Winlin Yang, the founder and driving force behind the success of the SRS (Simple Realtime Server) project. His SRS talk highlighted a popular open-source project (https://github.com/ossrs/srs) with various use cases such as Unity streaming, SRT remote broadcasting, and audio AI processing. It offered low latency (<200ms) and addressed the cons of WebRTC like encryption and UDP performance. Winlin suggested potential changes including SPA/PPS, while promoting SRT for higher quality broadcasting as a replacement for RTMP.

Winlin Yang pointing out why RTMP and WebRTC is a better choice than LLHLS for real-world scenarios

Iron Man in Real Life: Exploring the Possibilities of our Voice and AI

Garrett Graves from Twitch’s talk featured a live demo of S.A.T.U.R.D.A.Y, a cutting-edge voice-controlled AI system resembling Tony Stark’s J.A.R.V.I.S. It showcases real-time audio-to-text translation, AI processing, and text-to-audio conversion during a WebRTC call. The demo highlighted applications in personal assistants, translation, and voice-activated devices. 

01.pnV W つ ヨ WO ヨ 0 0 亠 ↓ 亠 0 亠 0 ・ 、 明 ← / つ 0 ^ / ・ 乙 彡 み う 彡 ノ / を 一 亠 L-L5 ー ↓ → WOJ WO ヨ / 卆 0 ー 亠 5L-L WO ヨ の 勿 グ 勿 ・ s 0 / 01 ヤ ハ s 0 ノ s 0 。 → つ ヨ WO ヨ
Diagram of the current real time voice bot. Using Pion and webrtc.rs

An Everything but Technical View on AI and Telecom

The last talk of the day, at least for me, was by Mira Georgieva of Zoiper. She introduced the fears of AI – and the reasons why still to use AI – based on their experience with banafo.com and with a particular focus in telecom.

5+ years of React Native WebRTC

I was able to catch Saúl Ibarra Corretgé of 8×8’s talk on Thursday about how React Native has been powering Jitsi Meet and countless other applications for many years now. He discussed the story of their migration to a Unified Plan, and shared some WebRTC “war stories”.

We were certainly thankful to Saúl, as he also took time out of his day on Wednesday to appear live from CommCon on WebRTC Live for an episode on What’s Next for Jitsi and JaaS? 

Adventures in Real Time Observability with qryn

The last talk I was lucky enough to catch was by Alex Maitland of Gigapipe. Alex introduced a polyglot observability tool that can be used for RTC.

Alex Maitland talking about their Gigapipe observability service using QXIP open source products QXIP: Telecom Observability

Everything is better in a beautiful 700-year-old English country manor house with nice weather!

WebRTC technology continues to expand, witnessing the emergence of increasingly intricate use cases. This includes extensive integration with AI, advancements in VR/AR applications, and the ongoing exploration of improved methods for real-time broadcasting, telephony service interaction, and monitoring.

CommCon represents an exceptional platform to foster collaboration and encourage learning of RTC technology. Sponsoring these events is our way to thank and give a big shout-out to those who make the RTC community better by maintaining or contributing code, submitting issues, or even participating in surveys or joining these conferences to share their knowledge.

This year’s event featured exceptional presentations and networking that provided valuable insights and sparked engaging discussions. Dan Jenkins and his team did a tremendous job. I was so happy to attend!

While we are on the topic of experts …

Here at WebTC.ventures, we specialize in assessing, building, integrating, testing, and managing RTC applications. A lot of our work these days involve integration work with many of the amazing products highlighted at CommCon. If something here is of interest to you and you want to explore how it could work with your application, we’d love to help!

Recent Blog Posts