2020 has been a devastating year globally. The COVID 19 pandemic has affected nearly every aspect of our lives. There’s no doubt it will continue to affect our lives throughout 2021. Sadly, we will see many more lives lost. Long lasting scars - and healing Traumatic events such as this have a way of leaving scars on society for a long time, sometimes as long as the lifetime of the generations most affected. For example, my

For the second year running, our CEO and Founder, Arin Sime, curated the WebRTC track of the Real Time Communications Conference at the Illinois Institute of Technology. We were also proud to be a sponsor. The IIT RTC annual conference is a globally recognized collaborative event where industry and academia connect. It brings together software developers, network engineers, entrepreneurs, business executives, students, and academic educators and researchers to promote an open exchange of ideas to lead future

What’s the most important thing that you can do to make your live video application successful? Anything you can do to improve call quality! This will certainly make your users more satisfied with your app and therefore make you more successful. However, optimization can only get us so far. This is because we can’t always control call quality, no matter how much tweaking we do on our media servers. And the biggest factor in call quality is

The pandemic has forced the big players in cloud computing to offer communication services, of which arguably the biggest is Amazon with their Amazon Web Services platform. Now AWS is offering SDK’s and API’s for their pre-existing Amazon Chime video conferencing application. This will allow customers to easily build their own real-time communication apps with Amazon's infrastructure as the backbone. In this post, we will go through setting up a simple videoconferencing app with the

For basic one to one video communications on the web, we could just use WebRTC and connect peers directly. However, when we want advanced functionalities (ie, recording or transcoding), or if we have more participants, we will need the help of a media server. A WebRTC media server essentially is a server optimized to more efficiently receive and send media. There are many great open source WebRTC media servers out there. (We mentioned some of them

There are many different ways to build your WebRTC application. You can use a CPaaS service like Vonage, Twilio or Agora. You can implement your own Peer-to-Peer application directly against the standard. Or, you can build on top of open source media servers like Jitsi and Janus. If you choose to use open source media servers, the next thing to decide is whether you want to use an SFU or an MCU. What does that mean? We

Kranky Geek 2020 was another conference that was held online this year due to COVID. And another remote conference that, despite that fact, exceeded our expectations. (Read more on Virtual Conferences and Networking in the Pandemic.) Kranky Geek brings together real-time communication experts from around the globe to discuss the current state and the immediate future of the WebRTC ecosystem. While we missed traveling to a fun city like San Francisco as we did last year,

On November 11, 2020, WebRTC.ventures produced our 48th episode of WebRTC Live. Arin's guest was Natalie Silvanovich, a security researcher on Google Project Zero whose current focus is browser security, including script engines, WebAssembly and WebRTC. You might assume that WebRTC is inherently secure, but Natalie opened our eyes to potential risks and helped us understand how we can protect our WebRTC applications. She discussed types of WebRTC vulnerabilities such as memory corruption and logic

On October 28, 2020, WebRTC.ventures produced our 47th episode of WebRTC Live. Arin's guest was Sean DuBois, Pion WebRTC Creator and Developer at Amazon Web Services. He is also the author of WebRTC For The Curious, an open source book created by WebRTC implementers to share their hard-earned knowledge. As Sean says, "WebRTC is a wonderful technology but is difficult to use." WebRTC for the Curious is designed for: Developers who don’t even know what WebRTC

In a previous blog post, we discussed the advent of Microsoft’s new Communication-Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) platform, Azure Communication Services. Today, we will get our hands dirty and implement a Group Video Calling App that can handle up to 50 participants. We will go through setting up the app in your local environment and look at some key features in the code. Prerequisites (1. Calling Hero Sample): Create an Azure account with an active subscription. For details,

Part of our blog series on Virtual Events in the Pandemic Have you ever wished you could attend a wedding virtually? Probably not. Although when I got married to my wonderful wife, Lauren, over 21 years ago, I think we both would have been very tempted to make it a virtual gathering. It would have reduced the stress on planning and balancing all the competing interests of family members. But when I was married in 1999,

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Our team at WebRTC.ventures often leverages a Communication-Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) in our live video application development. Each CPaaS has its own pros and cons. We do our best to keep up with them all so we can best serve our clients.  With a global pandemic still raging and millions more people working remotely, the CPaaS market is bound to grow this year. That’s why we were very interested to learn that Microsoft was launching their own

Two members of the WebRTC.ventures team, Hamza Nasir and Justin Williams, participated in TADHack 2020 Chicago/North America earlier this month. Their hack was to create a CPaaS solution for a more organized and efficient way to handle missed calls when you’re away from work using AI. They came home with the Symbl.ai prize! Brainstorming Due to COVID, this year’s hackathon was fully remote. The team worked from home, using Slack and GitHub to communicate and

I’ve been to some fun conferences. Twilio always puts on a good show -- and an even better after party! So it certainly one of the many (very understandable) disappointments of this year was that SIGNAL 2020 would be remote. Alas, I would not have the chance to cross lightsabers again with Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson. Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson, myself, and WebRTC.ventures Senior Engineer Germán Goldenstein at SIGNAL 2017 Not surprisingly, Twilio still did

WebRTC has been around for a while. But like everything in software development, there is always more to learn. Since the original launch of WebRTC in 2011 by Google, a lot has changed. As an industry, we have learned a lot about how to build and scale WebRTC in many use cases for which WebRTC was not originally designed. There have been many new commercial platforms built to help developers use WebRTC. We’ve also seen

I’m pleased to say that the 2020 IIT RTC conference is coming up quickly and we have a very exciting WebRTC and Real Time Applications track planned for you! You should register to attend the conference virtually right now - it’s free! The conference will be hosted on HopIn this year, and we have a very impressive lineup of WebRTC thought leaders talking about topics including Scaling WebRTC, media servers, security, and more! The overall

WebRTC.venture’s Senior Software Engineer, Alberto Gonzalez Trastoy, will be among the many exciting speakers at Agora’s Real-Time Engagement 2020 Conference. The event is designed to reimagine the future of interactive voice, video, and streaming. RTE2020 will be held October 13 and 14. This year, the conference is virtual -- and free! Alberto Gonzalez Trastoy, Senior Software Engineer, WebRTC Ventures, presents “Latest WebRTC Development Trends and Implementations” at AllThingsRTC, the premier real-time communication event hosted by

On September 23, 2020, WebRTC.ventures produced our 46th episode of WebRTC Live. Arin's guest was Alan Quayle, founder of TADHack. TADHack helps people learn about the latest Internet, IT, and Telecoms / Communications technologies; and use those technologies to solve problems that matter to them.  TADHack Global 2020 is just around the corner on October 10 and 11. Locations around the world will run in parallel over one weekend. Arin and Alan spoke about how developers can

On September 9, 2020, WebRTC.ventures produced Episode #45 of WebRTC Live. This free webinar series features the latest use cases and technical updates to this increasingly popular coding standard for live video. The recording is now available for all who missed the live webinar! Arin's guest was Lorenzo Miniero (@elminiero) of Meetecho. Lorenzo and Arin discussed a prototype Lorenzo has built for connecting a common broadcasting tool (NDI – Network Device Interface) with WebRTC. This is

Part of our blog series on Virtual Events in the Pandemic. As a tech professional and a business owner responsible for sales and marketing of my software development business, I spend a good portion of my time traveling to different conferences. Sometimes as a speaker, vendor, or just an attendee, I go to these conferences with three goals in mind:  I want to learn, I want to network, and I want to meet new customers