[If you are new around here, then you should know I've been writing about WebRTC lately. You can skim through the WebRTC post series or just read what WebRTC is all about.]

WebRTC brings with it a lot of new opportunities, as it marries the web with communication. The missing link though, is to have experienced developers and product managers in both domains. And this gap is something that a company like Oxagile can fill in.

Oxagile is an outsourcing company that did video related projects for their customers for years now. Recently, they have started doing some projects in WebRTC, which immediately placed them in the companies I need to interview. Sergey Marchuk, Co-founder & CTO at Oxagile took the time to answer my questions.

What is Oxagile all about?

Oxagile is a custom web and mobile software development company with years of experience and profound knowledgebase in online video and real time communication solutions. Our core aim is helping our valuable customers and partners to select best of breed video-related services and tools for optimizing their media efficiency.

How does WebRTC fits into Oxagile’s story then?

Since its creation back in 2005 Oxagile has chosen the IP video services to be its core competency. For the past few years we’ve successfully implemented a number of IPTV, VoD, OTT solutions to mid-size and large accounts. We’ve always been interested in new techniques and technologies that our customers could benefit from. So, after visiting the first WebRTC conference last year we do not have any more doubts about great potentiality of WebRTC and we are continuously trying to expand our attainments in this emerging technology.

Based on the fact that you have been providing video related services in the past, how are you planning on leveraging these capabilities for WebRTC?

Before WebRTC we had considerable experience in integrating third-party solutions like Vidyo, TokBox, ooVoo or developing custom Flash-plugin based solutions for video chat functionality. With WebRTC we have a unique opportunity to avoid using any of those third-parties, making real time video communication experience even smoother and user-friendly for our end-clients. Right now we are considering a possibility of upgrading a number of existing client solutions to WebRTC and, of course, helping new companies with WebRTC-enabled solutions from the very beginning.

Any interesting WebRTC related projects you can share?

There is a good proverb “The cobbler always wears the worst shoes”, so we at Oxagile do not want to be such a cobbler and decided to implement WebRTC video call and data sharing capabilities to our corporate website (will be released in a several days), so our potential customers could benefit from WebRTC when connecting to our sales reps.

Apart from that, we have been working on several projects with XirSys, a California-based company specializing in real-time web communications. We’ve developed and continue improving a flexible JavaScript API which helps developers to get advantages of WebRTC capabilities and allows P2P connection establishment and guaranteed NAT traversal via XirSys highly reliable websocket and STUN/TURN server as well as removing some browser specific impedances.

What gaps do you see with WebRTC, and how do you think a company like Oxagile can make these into opportunities?

The core gap, or I would call it specificity, for now is WebRTC implementation process as is doesn’t provide everything you need to start your own real-time communication session without additional development efforts. So, you either need some third-party solution like XirSys on top of WebRTC to take care of connectivity (“signaling”) to another client that you would like to talk to, network traversal and browser compatibility OR have some reliable IT professionals who could handle that part. Actually, we are thinking of such specificities as additional opportunities for Oxagile.

You’ve used WebRTC. What worked for you with it and what was more challenging?

We did not face any major challenges with WebRTC on the web. Of course, there were all these implementation differences and workarounds for particular Chrome and Firefox browser versions, but they were overpassed successfully.

What we are finding the most challenging part now is WebRTC support on Apple iOS. Google doesn’t provide any out-of-the-box hints for it, so we’ve been digging into it for a while, assembling the WebRTC project under iOS, putting nuts and bolts together. As result of these efforts, we’ve managed to enable audio and data channel functionality from/to iOS devices, and we’re now struggling with video connectivity. It’s more complicated as no one has done it before (I mean publicly opened) but we’re making a decent progress and we’re quite optimistic about it.

Given the opportunity, what would you change in WebRTC?

We’d suggest creating some sort of centric knowledge database or portal from the very beginning, where all companies and independent developers that are interested in WebRTC integration could share their ideas and upload know-hows related to the technology. At this point, I’d like to thank you, Tsahi, for putting so much effort for aggregating and sharing all the useful info about WebRTC on your website. Still, it would be great having one technical resource where all technical info is accumulated rather than searching the web for some ideas, hints, and workarounds.

Do you plan on introducing products on your own or is it a service centric area for you?

For now, it’s mainly service centric, but we have our own mobile product development department with a major focus on iOS apps development (AppAnnex), and we’re constantly brainstorming on new application ideas. There are some ideas already generated (I cannot share them yet) where WebRTC can be of a great help. So, enabling WebRTC capability on iOS has some sort of priority for our team now.

WebRTC. A challenge or an opportunity for an outsourcing company? (and why)

Definitely, it is the opportunity. It is one more option to help our clients reaching their business goals by integrating and customizing new real time communication technology according to their needs.

It is the opportunity for us in many business verticals where our target market is located. For example, e-learning – where tutors can interact with students online, or healthcare – where patients can connect with their doctors remotely, or e-commerce – where seamless connection to a support team or a salesperson can be easily setup.

The technology is not limited to this particular set of industries, it can become a useful and convenient way of real-time communication almost in each segment, that is why WebRTC is so buzzy nowadays. WebRTC-enabled solutions have access to billion plus potential users, so many outsourcing companies such as Oxagile can find their unique niche in the process of WebRTC expansion.

What’s next for Oxagile with WebRTC?

More WebRTC powered projects, more satisfied clients, even more happy users. WebRTC will certainly be an essential part of our service offering.

-

The interviews are intended to give different viewpoints than my own – you can read more WebRTC interviews.

The post Oxagile and WebRTC: An Interview With Sergey Marchuk appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Whenever someone wants to say that Android is bad, they start by speaking about fragmentation – how developers are having a hard time supporting so many handset types. Here’s what Simon Judge has to say about this phenomena:

My personal view is that the BBC made a mistake. On projects over the last year, for apps shipped in the UK only (iPlayer’s audience) I have been seeing approximately 75% of smartphone devices are Android. Approximately 80% of these devices are Samsung. A large proportion of the remainder are HTC. The large Android share should be enough for the BBC (and others) to look for better compromises.

To Simon, this is a matter of where you put your focus on Android, and let’s face it – focus on Android today is mainly thinking Galaxy and Samsung.

It was funny starting off my RSS reads with two adjacent posts with totally opposite opinion:

Richard Windsor on Radio Free Mobile, who usually thinks Android is crap when it comes to the user experience, had this to say about the comparison of Android to iOS:

Fragmentation. Android is very fragmented. So fragmented in fact that I estimate that only 32% of Android devices are really capable of delivering a decent Google experience.

I can’t say he is wrong, but I think that most target a specific set of audience – one that isn’t that fragmented.

And then TechCrunch, working up their Apple-bashing in the days before WWDC, had Kevin Marks come at an interesting tangent, of how iOS is fragmented:

As someone who uses both Android and iOS regularly, I’m getting increasingly frustrated by fragmentation. However it’s not on my Android devices I see this, but rather on the iOS ones.

He then goes off to list the areas where fragmentation is actually hurting iOS a lot more than it is hurting Android (specifically form factors, screen sizes, intra-app communication and web support). It is a fresh look at things.

Now, I am not sure where fragmentation is worse, but I do know this: Android is actively trying to treat fragmentation and assist developers in the process. Is Apple doing anything about it?

Our future is going to span over multiple devices, with the expectation of the user to get a coherent experience for the same service across devices. This makes users align on a specific ecosystem – be it an iOS one or an Android one. In which one will developers offer the better experience moving forward? In the one that requires rethinking the whole app across form factors, or the one where any development task is one where form factor fragmentation is taken into account from the beginning?

The post Fragmenation in Smartphones – an iOS or an Android Problem? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

[If you are new around here, then you should know I've been writing about WebRTC lately. You can skim through the WebRTC post series or just read what WebRTC is all about.]

A confession.

When I started out looking at WebRTC, it was from my own narrow worldview – that of video conferencing. The premise of my whole way of thinking was around how WebRTC can be used to bring video conferencing to the browser and removing the necessity of an application installation. It seemed like achieving the impossible back then. I even had a larger notion. One of replacing the whole concept of what a room system is.

Today? I cringe when the only business model presented by a company is to connect a web browser to today’s video conferencing systems.

Having the opportunity to talk to companes, listen to their pitch, understanding their service and business model and interviewing them; gives me a different perspective of things. It always amazes me of the things people achieve with WebRTC.

The latest Google demo of ponging with a bear?

Quaint. Interesting. Gaming with video calling. Nothing really new. Maybe besides showing off that this thing can actually be done in a browser.

Here is the current list of different ways in which companies are using WebRTC today:

1. Gaining access to the microphone and camera

Yap. There’s this. Most will say “this isn’t communication”, but I think people have been showing off some darn good stuff with it.

Be it a photo booth, speech to text or different kinds of video recognition capabilities – this thing has merit on its own.

2. Web voice and video calling

This one is easy. Most WebRTC startup companies can be found here – each with its own set of use cases to deal with. Dating, gaming, experts market, telemedicine – the list goes on.

3. Legacy web channel

Legacy is where the boring stuff is. It is IMS, VoIP and UC companies with products, where for them WebRTC is just another channel into their legacy system. I don’t have faith in this approach, as in the long run, my guess is that the web companies will eat their legacy counterparts alive.

4. P2P streaming / CDN’ing

This is where the whoa happens. That things about data connection and the ability to send whatever you want from one browser to another? There are companies exploiting it, and I am planning on having an interview with such a company in the near future.

The most comment use in this case is file sharing, P2P streaming or as an “add-on” to a CDN type of capability.

5. Plundering

That’s the classic one. WebRTC has a pretty permissive open source license, and it has good quality. So there are companies that plunder it for their own needs – take its echo canceler, the whole shebang, the codec – whatever they need, port it and plug it into their own solutions.

-

There’s more than one way to use WebRTC. And UC? A blip in the radar of WebRTC – nothing more.

The post 5 Different Ways of Using WebRTC appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

It is also a post that tells you to create your own images and then host them in places that lets others use them. Don’t copyright your work – let it flow – you wouldn’t believe the amount of pride you will find in it.

When you start blogging, you start using images. People will tell you that images bring readership, and each blog tends to do it differenty. To me it is about creating images most of the time (at least when I have time). And I do it in various ways – experimenting with the medium and playing around with it, along with my kids in our weekly “creativity time”.

These days, I publish these images on Twitter with a bit of text around them to make the searchable. I also place them under Creative Commons, to make sure people will make use of them without the hassle of asking permission.

There are 4 images that I take real pride in. Each with his own story.

VoLTE

Search Google for a VoLTE image.

You will find this image:

I did that for a post I wanted to publish on my RADVISION blog when I was employed there. There was no VoLTE logo (as there is no big-enough-WebRTC-logo) so I had to invent one.

I copied the LTE logo that existed on the web to PowerPoint, added WordArt for the Vo prefix and used it.

Somehow, this logo of mine found its way to distant places of the web. I even find it at times in internal presentations of my current employer – something that warms my heart.

Android vs Apple

This was a fun one. I wanted to write about Android and iOS, and the battle between them. Saw an interesting image on TheNextWeb that I needed for a post, but didn’t know if it was under the right license, which meant I had to create one on my own.

As I had time that week, I went to buy some plasticine and spent an hour with it just for the fun of it. Took a photo and I was done. End result? Over 3K views and a bit of adoption on other blogs.

The Finger

And then there’s the finger face.

Know how you work on a presentation but can’t really get the concept you want from an image? Especially not if you are looking for a creative-commons one? It happened to me on concepts of question and innovation. There are images for them, but I wanted something a bit cleaner that can fit a specific theme I had in mind.

So I made these images.

Question:

Idea:

Each now over 2K views and shared in various places and languages around the globe.

It was easy to do and rather fun – as it opened up a game of sorts with my daughter.

WebRTC

No post is ever complete here without its WebRTC angle. And for that, we have my WebRTC image that I used for a post right here.

Who would have thought it would become the most used WebRTC related image that GigaOm posts end up using?

-

Have a creative weekend!

The post 4 of My Best Images appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

[If you are new around here, then you should know I've been writing about WebRTC lately. You can skim through the WebRTC post series or just read what WebRTC is all about.]

A while ago, I jumped into a conversation on Twitter – interrupting it.

@aswath that is sorta my point. WebRTC is a solution in search of a problem. The main target market isn't interested. Not sustainable IMHO.

— Ken Camp (@sherylshusband) May 10, 2013

Ken Camp versus Aswath Rao on the usefulness (or uselessness) or WebRTC. What got on my nerve is a comment in there somewhere: “WebRTC is a solution in search of a problem”.

And my response to it?

VoIP companies are a solution looking to a problem in WebRTC.

You see, WebRTC has an insidious proposition if you are a UC/VoIP vendor. It takes a lot of the smarts and core assets that you have and makes them irrelevant. Overnight.

Years ago I’ve been asked repeatedly by prospects wanting to license VoIP technology to offer web based solutions. No plugins was one of the selection criteria. Low cost was another. Deployable to millions of users was needed, so the pricing model wasn’t suitable either. Good thing no one else could provide such a solution when we couldn’t. but that has all changed now.

Web based solutions? WebRTC

No plugins? WebRTC

Low cost? WebRTC

Deployable to millions? WebRTC

We can now argue if and where it fits exactly and the limitations it has, but 2 years ago? It was impossible to even think of a solution. Now? We talk limitations.

So UC vendors laugh and joke about companies with “weird” business ideas such as an experts market. They say that Wello-like services exist over Skype as well. They complain about missing signaling. And they fail to miss the bigger picture.

They fail to see 150 companies (!) already adopting WebRTC – small and big ones.

They fail to see their own kind adopting WebRTC (GENBAND, Vidtel, BroadSoft, …).

They fail to see that the market have changed. They have become from cutting edge to incumbents and dinosaurs.

In a world where AT&T, Telefonica and Orange all play with WebRTC and launch WebRTC related services/experiments – how can UC vendors ignore it?

I think the world has changed. It not UC that is important any longer – not in the traditional sense of it – it is WebRTC related paradigms that are important.

Who cares about UC anymore?

-

I actually do care about UC. And it is why I am rather worried from the ostrich position that so many in the “traditional” UC market are hiding behind.

The post Who Cares About UC Anyway? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

I remember this course in the university. One that had our professor trying to explain the quadratic numbers field. It had something to do with having a number in between every two other numbers. And then complaining that somehow this doesn’t work on his bathtub water dial – he could never get the temperature of the water just right.

This to me, is like finding the delineation point between analytics and BI.

BI – Business Intelligence. Put simply, this is the ability to show dashboards and reports to managers about how the business operates. Collect information across the enterprise, aggregate it and then display it on a graph.

Analytics starts in much the same manner, but somehow it does things that are more sophisticated. What that sophistication is – there’s a question for you.

Here are a few examples. Can you guess in each one if it relates to analytics or BI?

Google Analytics

Is it analytics or pure BI?

We let Google collect visitor counts of people coming to our website. And then we just view it. We look at the history. We track specific parameters. We slice and dice the data from different angles.

But is there really any analytics going on in there? Something that merits its name?

Hard to say.

Autocomplete of Google search

When Google starts suggesting search term from the first characters I click – is it BI or analytics?

It is predicting what I most probably want. And it does that from analyzing huge quantities of information. Easy to call it analytics.

Autocomplete on Facebook

What about autocomplete on Facebook?

When you search for something, Facebook starts showing possible results – names of people in your circle, pages you follow.

Is this analytics? It seems like a simple search. Much simpler than the autocomplete of a Google search. But is this the difference then? The amount of data being searched to bring a useful suggestion?

Autocomplete on a phone directory

And the autocomplete on my phone’s dialer?

It searches for contacts based on the number I click. It looks for prefixes first. It may show me numbers I dial more frequently first in such searches.

But can we call it analytics? And if we can’t, then what’s the real difference between this and the autocomplete on Facebook?

And what if I decide to mark better results based on the time of day the search is made correlated to previous calls the user made? Or based on his location? Does it make it into analytics?

-

Somewhere along this line, I lost track of what’s analytics and what isn’t. What do you think? Which of the above can be defined as analytics?

The post The Finer Line Between Analytics and BI appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

[If you are new around here, then you should know I've been writing about WebRTC lately. You can skim through the WebRTC post series or just read what WebRTC is all about.]

I used to work in the signaling business. Developing protocol stacks, marketing them – explaining their value to customers. That need to follow a certain spec. To implement a well-known set of features. To follow industry use cases.

Those days are long gone.

You can look at 2013 as the year signaling died.

It was a slow death, so there’s no exact date, but I think we’re there.

The notions of interconnectivity, federation and interoperability were used to be important. They were laws of nature. Things you just had to have in a VoIP product. And now? They are tools to be used when needed, and they are either needed by the architects, to tap a specific ecosystems of products and developers or by business people, deciding how to wield them in the battlefield.

The decision not to add signaling to WebRTC might have been an innocent one – I can envision engineers sitting around a table in a Google facility some two years ago, having an interesting conversation:

“Guys, let’s add SIP to what we’re doing with WebRTC”

“But we don’t have anything we developed. We will need to use some of that open source stuff”

“And besides – why not pack XMPP with it? Our own GTalk uses XMPP”

“Go for it. Let’s do XMPP. We’ve got that libjingle lying around here somewhere”

“Never did like it, and there are other XMPP libraries floating around – you remember the one we used for that project back in the day? It is way better than libjingle”

“Hmm… thinking about it, it doesn’t seem like we’re ready for signaling. And besides, what we’re trying to do is open source a media engine for the web – we already have JavaScript XMPP – no need to package it now – it will just slow us down”

And here we are, sometime later, debating why did they not include signaling – it can be as simple as realities of meeting a deadline, a decision not to decide, or not to fight another religious battle about which protocol to use – or it could have been a guided decision.

It was one of many similar decisions that have been taking place lately.

A few other notable decisions that are killing signaling?

• Apple, selecting SIP for FaceTime; and then including their own proprietary push notifications, not standardizing it, and locking the service down
• The rise of WhatsApp, Line, iMessage and a slew of other IM apps – all with no notion of what exact signaling protocol they use (the fact that I don’t know or care…)
• Tango? Viber? Do they use a proprietary solution or a standardized one? Would that make a real business difference to them?
• Skype… which is now got its connectivity to Lync. Skype – proprietary. Lync – “SIP”ish in nature
• And last, but not least, Google dropping XMPP support from their Hangouts service

Notice a pattern?

Signaling is now a commodity. Something you use as needed. It also means that islands are now the norm for communication services, and openness on the protocol level is the exception.

The post The Death of Signaling as we Know it appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

[If you are new around here, then you should know I've been writing about WebRTC lately. You can skim through the WebRTC post series or just read what WebRTC is all about.]

I am not sure about you, but I have this déjà vu from this weekend. Since the leak about the NSA getting data streams from various US companies, the web is running amok. And somehow, WebRTC guys are trying to ride this wave. To where? Who knows.

But let me first explain.

I’ve been in this industry for over a decade. Video conferencing uptake was dismal at best. Yes, enterprises adopted it, but somehow the whole industry when you looked at it wasn’t big. What do you do when that happens? You try to make people adopt it.

And with video conferencing, I’ve seen several iterations:

• Planes get crashed into buildings? Try to promote video conferencing over business trips
• Gas prices rise? Try to promote video conferencing over business trips
• A volcano eruption disrupts international flights? Try to promote video conferencing over business trips

Can you notice a pattern?

And now it seems that whenever there’s talk about privacy and security, people start promoting WebRTC as the savior. I’ll be the first to say security of WebRTC is top notch, but from that to solving humanity’s problems?

Just search social networks for WebRTC and security and see the amount of chatter in those echo chambers.

Yes, WebRTC does P2P for the media and enables encryption. But no – it is only a technology and how vendors will be using is what really matters. And there, I see more systems that will end up passing media through a server than not – just because it opens up more features and capabilities.

I had the opportunity to read Thomas Frey’s article about the end of theft this past week. It got me into thinking of many things, but coupled with what we see now, I think we can start debating about privacy – and the end of privacy. When everything gets connected, and when our own devices are always on, always listening to our voice commands and always watching us for our needs – where does WebRTC even play a role?

With this hyper connectedness comes the relinquishing of privacy. And it won’t be all bad mind you – it is also why two months ago I warmly suggested Ramez Naam’s science fiction book: Nexus.

-

Security is important. Privacy is as well. Governments not violating these rights and even promoting them is important. But from that to saying WebRTC is the solution?

We’re better than that. WebRTC has a lot of advantages, but I wouldn’t say that maintaining our privacy against governments and the powers that be is one of them.

And frankly, I don’t think WebRTC needs to be promoted that way to be successful.

-

I wouldn’t have burdened you with a post this weekend, but my G+ notifications were too much to bear without sharing.

Have a great weekend!

The post Security as a WebRTC Adoption Reason is an Excuse appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

I follow and read a lot of blogs. It is becoming ridiculously complex. While a lot of them I skim through – deciding to read less than 5% of their content – others require reading each and every word.

When the specific post is long, and is full of content and skinny in external links that require following to understand the content, I send it to Kindle and read it later on – having the time and the right focus for long-form.

What I found is, that there are specific people that I tend to send to Kindle almost automatically. I see it as a badge of honor for them.

-

To send them to Kindle, I simply use the relevant Chrome extension – you can find it in the list of extensions I find useful. I essentially just open up the post I want to read, and press the Send to Kindle button.

-

Who are these people?

Bob Cringely

Bob has a great blog on technology and silicon valley – and his views and readers are interesting. Most of the times, the posts are on the longer side, so I tend to read him on my Kindle.

He is also the writer of the book Accidental Empires that got published on his blog recently – a book I enjoyed immensely.

Martin Geddes

Martin Geddes is one of these visionaries that I just enjoy reading. He doesn’t have a blog – he publishes a newsletter. The newsletter has great content that I find mind provoking each time.

You can subscribe to it on Martin Geddes’ website.

Michael Lopp (Rands)

Michael Lopp is a great writer. Especially when it comes to analyze engineering management issues. This is what his blog is about, and the posts tend to be long and engaging.

If you like what he writes, he has an interesting book – Managing Humans – it is on my list of soft-skills books and for a good reason – I can suggest it to any manager who needs to deal with developers wholeheartedly.

Thomas Frey

Thomas Frey is a futurist. His content sits well with my fetish towards science fiction books.

He writes engaging and long form posts on his blog, Futurist Speaker. The content varies in the areas it touches, and always gets my mind going to out of the box thinking – something I find critical in whatever I do these days.

Vision Mobile

Not a person, but a research company – and one of my magnificent seven.

Nothing to say here besides the fact that their content is top notch.

-

Now to you – what long-form blogs do you enjoy reading?

The post The People I Send to Kindle appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

[If you are new around here, then you should know I've been writing about WebRTC lately. You can skim through the WebRTC post series or just read what WebRTC is all about.]

There’s a codec war going on around WebRTC, focusing on the mandatory video codec – it can either be VP8 or H.264. While Google, Mozilla and developers are mostly in the VP8 camp (read: FREE), the rest of the industry and the ecosystem is barricading itself aound H.264 (read: ROYALTIES). While some say it is a technical debate, I beg to defer – it is a political and a business debate. At the end of the day, the end users are not going to feel the difference in quality.

I think that we’ve moved on to a much more interesting war – the one brewing around VP9 and H.265. VP8 may lose the VP8 round, but the real war is around VP9. Why is that? Because the main “concerns” people have about VP8 don’t matter in the case of VP9:

No Hardware Support

Hardware support is hard to deal with. H.264 has a huge footprint. I’d argue it is probably larger than the “1 billion potential WebRTC devices”.

Hardware support for a video codec isn’t easy. It usually takes 1-2 years to begin with – once you have the basic hardware in place, there’s the time it takes to develop the device (add 6-12 months) and then the actual application.

Going with VP8 from 0 to H.264 HW coverage is an impossible task.

Switching gears to VP9, the story resets. VP9 is compared against H.265 – they are on par. The beauty here is that there is no H.265 support in hardware yet, which places both codecs in a similar starting position.

The Need to Transcode

There’s a lot of H.264 equipment out there that people would love to be able to connect to WebRTC, so one of the other excuses not to use VP8 is usually around the fact that making it mandatory means there will be a need to transcode the video in all such interactions.

While true, we can argue about the percentage of the use cases that will actually need such capabilities. The problem with that, is that we will be fighting over details. Not a good tactic.

VP9, on the other hand, is again comparable to H.265. If the industry is indeed going to replace H.264 with another codec, then all legacy devices will require transcoding – be it to H.265 or VP9. Same starting position.

Missing Ecosystem

There’s no real ecosystem yet around H.265. Well… there is – the companies that have standardized it; but eventually the game is wide open, especially when a behemoth like Google is changing the rules of the game.

During Google I/O, two messages were crystal clear to me, and chipset vendors should take notice.

1. NVIDIA showed off 1080p video call using WebRTC on a Tegra 4 based tablet. It uses hardware accelerated VP8. It is a beginning of a hardware ecosystem around VPx line of codecs, and there are move chipset vendors I know of that are headed towards that goal.
2. Google is working on two separate advances that may soon collide:
   1. Compression tech for its mobile Chrome browser, which crunches HTML, CSS, JS and images up to save on bandwidth
   2. VP9 support in YouTube. With 100 hours of videos uploaded a minute and 1 billion unique monthly visitors, YouTube support for VP9 is hard to ignore

   Connect the dots here, and we may soon see VP9 in our mobile browsers for anything that Google sees fit

The first is a nudge to other hardware vendors to get their act together and invest in VP9 to have it ready with/before/instead of H.265.

The second is an indication to developers that an ecosystem of an important browser and an important mobile platform are set on VP9.

-

Google has the technology and the digital footprint to try and force competitor’s hands from H.265 to VP9. And I think it is about to attempt just that.

The post Can Google Force VP9 on an H.264 World? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.