Today we’re proud to announce our latest WebRTC innovation: Mantis, a cloud-scaling infrastructure for our OpenTok on WebRTC platform.
This is another big step forward for the TokBox team as we continue to pursue our goal of providing application developers with simple yet powerful APIs. APIs that not only leverage the latest standards to deliver the best possible experience, but that are backed by a scalable, smart cloud which supports interoperability across a variety of end-points.
On February 4th Mozilla and Google announced that their respective browsers could now talk to each other via WebRTC. This is another big milestone in WebRTC’s path towards becoming available in all modern web browsers, albeit, today only in an early development build of Firefox, version 21+ (currently Nightly and soon to be Aurora).
We’ve also been working hard on making OpenTok on WebRTC work with both Firefox and Chrome so you too can enjoy all this cross-browser goodness!
The first thing that you need is version 21 or higher of Firefox, currently available through the Aurora FTP site and Nightly site.
WebRTC Demo Day! Unless you have been living under a rock, you have heard of WebRTC. A few weeks ago, Google unleashed Chrome 23 which has WebRTC and PeerConnection support. This is really exciting because everyone on chrome (and IE users with Chrome Frame plugin) can now experience the next generation of communication via live video. Today is the day to experience it. Simply go to https://OpenTokRTC.com and join a room! If you’re lucky, you might catch a few WebRTC Streams from iOS devices.
Nearly 7 months ago, we publicly announced that the OpenTok API would extend its reach to native mobile application developers by publishing the OpenTok iOS SDK. In the time since, we have tightened the performance of the SDK runtime for iOS devices and spent a good deal of time learning about how best to deliver video to the mobile platform. While iOS commands a large portion of the mobile app market, it is intuitive that we should build similar SDKs for other popular platforms outside of the browser. It is a pleasure to announce that we are developing the OpenTok Android SDK, to allow native Android developers to bring live video chat to their apps.
A new standard is making its way into web browsers and other clients around the world over the next few months that will likely change the way that we communicate with each other. WebRTC (Real-Time Communication) is a set of protocols and technologies that have been proposed to allow modern web browsers (currently Chrome 23 has support) to embed live audio/video communications without a plugin like flash.
Over the last few months we’ve been hard at work on a new variant to our iOS Video SDK, which we’re dubbing the OpenTok WebRTC for iOS SDK.
In the world of video WebRTC is a really big deal. The quality increase we’ve seen in WebRTC video versus our current Flash SDK is pretty phenomenal. For instance, video latency is typically less than 250ms under most network conditions. This is important to maintain a flowing conversation and avoid talking over other people on the call. Video quality is also noticeably better. The framerate and resolution are higher and adjusted dynamically over time to take advantage of the bandwidth and device capabilities that’s available between the clients.
