2020 is the year of video communications. The pandemic has plunged us 5-10 years into the future of adoption in a short span of time. Companies opened their backburners, increasing their investment in this market. By extension, this means WebRTC is now more important than ever.
This year also marks a distinct shift in Google’s support towards WebRTC. The two most glaring examples are:
- Unifying all of its comm apps under a single team. This includes WebRTC developers who are no longer “specific” to WebRTC
- Investing in machine learning innovation around WebRTC without making it a part of WebRTC, effectively launching a private, internal branch of WebRTC
What are companies in the communication space doing moving forward? How should they think about WebRTC and how should they plan for what lies ahead?
This is what I want to cover in this unique online workshop.
The Gist
This is going to be an online workshop that will take place during July. To keep you focused, it will be split into 3 sessions in 3 separate days.
- Three 2-hour online sessions
- Each session covering a specific topic
- One session a week
- Throughout the month of July
- Open mic
- You can voice your opinion and ask questions at all times during the sessions
- The intent is to create a place where we can talk and discuss the subjects at hand
- Understand together how they fit into your own company needs
- What will we cover?
- We will work through market trends affecting WebRTC development decisions
- Review real world case studies and examples
- Talk about alternatives moving forward and how they affect your basis of competition and differentiation
- Recorded
- All sessions will be recorded
- You will have full access to them later on
- Additional resources and materials
- Slide deck used for each session
- Written summaries covering the main points of each session
- Extra reading materials and links will be provided to those who want to deepen their understanding and research in the topics discussed
AGENDA
SESSION 1: Infrastructure and large scale deployments
Services are global in nature. We are all moving to the cloud but there are multiple ways to get there. WebRTC requires a low latency network with little packet loss. This makes the decision of the infrastructure architecture and deployment a crucial one.
In this session we will review what types of methods different successfully large WebRTC vendors have taken:
- Cloud infrastructure span and costs
- Building your own global network
- Thinking of service velocity
- Managing pricing
- Handling peak use
SESSION 2: Peeling the optimization onion
WebRTC requires lots of CPU and network resources. While writing a proof of concept or a simple application is relatively easy, figuring out how to deliver an optimized and superior user experience with it is a real challenge.
In this session we will go through the various tools available to us during the optimization process:
- How to manage large audio or video group conferences
- Figuring out video codecs today and in the future (H.264, HEVC, VP8, VP9 & AV1)
- Understanding simulcast, layouts, resolutions and bitrates
SESSION 3: Machine learning and the great unbundling
There are longer term trends taking place. Ones which are going to change how we think and use WebRTC and other communication technologies as developers. These trends are based on machine learning and its use in reaching a competitive advantage.
In this session we will try to understand these trends and how to better prepare for them:
- The great unbundling: WebCodecs, WebTransport and WebAssembly
- Introduction of WebRTC Insertable Streams
- Machine learning in RTC: Server side, edge inference and bowser support
- The most important ML/AI use cases in WebRTC media processing
