News from Industry
All I want for Christmas is Hangouts to use WebRTC on Firefox
As the year 2017 comes to an end, there was a small present. Hangouts started to support Firefox with WebRTC instead of a plug-in. While it had been public for a while that the Firefox WebRTC team had been testing this, it was a nice Christmas present to see this shipped. Tsahi Levent-Levi was one […]
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Kamailio v5.0.5 Released
# cd kamailio
# git checkout -b 5.0 origin/5.0Relevant notes, binaries and packages will be uploaded at:Modules’ documentation:What is new in 5.0.x release series is summarized in the announcement of v5.0.0:Note: the branch 5.0 is the previous stable branch. The latest stable branch is 5.1, at this time with v5.1.0 being released out of it. Be aware that you may need to change the configuration files and database structures from 5.0.x to 5.1.x. See more details about it at:Check also the details of next Kamailio World Conference, taking place in Berlin, Germany, during May 14-16, 2018. Call for presentations is now open!Thanks for flying Kamailio!
Kamailio World 2018 – Call For Presentations
10 Massive Applications Using WebRTC
WebRTC is… everywhere.
WebRTC started some 6 years ago. It was just another VoIP protocol specification that just happened to be targeted at browsers.
Six years in, and now WebRTC is everywhere. There are still those who believe it has failed, or haven’t lived up to its expectations. I’d say it is the vendors who failed to adopt it are the ones that have failed.
How do I know?
It has to do with those that are using it. Here are 10 massive applications that are making use of WebRTC. These companies trust WebRTC to offer them the leverage they need to deliver the user experience they strive for.
Looking for more vendors using WebRTC? Here are 10 interviews with inspiring vendors using WebRTC.
Download the eBook
What’s Massive in WebRTC Land?Before we start though, I want to say a word about what massive is.
It is really hard to know what’s massive. How do you count it? Especially when none of the vendors are willing to share their numbers in meaningful ways here.
So let’s do a back-of-the-napkin kind of calculation here for a sec –
In the recent Kranky Geek event, Google shared in their session an interesting statistic:
Over 1.5 billion of weekly audio/video minutes.
That’s easily upwards of 214 million minutes a day.
And that’s only on Chrome.
This number does include:
- Other browsers. Today that means Firefox, Edge and Safari
- Usage through plugins. Which covers Internet Explorer
- Electron and CEF based applications. And there are a few very popular ones I can think of
- Mobile applications, making use of WebRTC
- Those who take the bits and pieces of WebRTC that they need, integrate it with their service, and then just make use of it (not always with proper attribution)
So the numbers are larger. Much larger.
The Google Machine and its LeftoversBack to that more than 214 million minutes a day.
During March 2017, Serge Lachapelle, the person in charge of WebRTC in the past and now of Google Hangouts and Meet, shared some numbers about video conferencing at Google during Google Cloud Next 2017:
9+ years daily translates to over 4.7 + minutes daily.
That’s the amount of use Google makes internally of Hangouts.
It is safe to assume that external use of non-Googlers can double that number with little effort to over 9 million minutes a day.
And continuing this lenient calculation, Hangouts accounts for 4-5% of all voice and video traffic in WebRTC.
Consider here fact that I counted Hangouts over multiple devices, browsers and applications while comparing it to Chrome only numbers, so I am fudging here a bit. On the other hand, I took non-Googlers to account for only half the usage, which is probably way too little.
Anyways, let’s look at them 10 massive applications who are already using WebRTC.
1. Google Meet and Google Hangouts9+ years daily. Inside Google alone.
Google Meet (or more accurately, Hangouts) is most probably one of the main reasons we have WebRTC.
Google had their own video conferencing service, working from Gmail, but it needed a plugin. Real time video just wasn’t there in the browser, which is where and why WebRTC started. And it started with a contribution by Google which we now know as webrtc.org.
To date, Google Meet (or Hangouts), is a massive application that makes use of WebRTC.
2. Facebook MessengerHere’s something I wrote some 5 years ago. It is about Skype vs Facebook. Here’s how I phrased it then:
Facebook can adopt WebRTC and provide a calling experience that surpasses most VoIP players.
The rest of the analysis then is kinda funny. Facebook did end up adopting WebRTC wholeheartedly into Messenger, but none of my suggestions were implemented (which in hindsight was probably for the best).
Here’s where Facebook have integrated WebRTC already:
- Messenger – video chat and group video chat, mobile and browser
- Facebook Live – when co-broadcasting
- VR Chat – video calls in Oculus
- Then there’s Workplace by Facebook and Instagram Live Video Chat
All using WebRTC. I am even ignoring WhatsApp here (not sure what parts of WebRTC they use exactly).
At the recent Kranky Geek, we had Li-Tal Mashiach of Facebook talk about what it is they are doing with WebRTC and how do they scale their service.
No minutes here, but 400 million people using WebRTC every month. That’s 13+ million people a day on average. With only a minute each this is already massive.
3. DiscordI came across Discord and its use of WebRTC in July 2016. That’s when I added them to my dataset, through a message I saw on Facebook somewhere. As any other vendor that gets into my radar, I continued to follow them closely.
Discord is a social platform for gamers (for lack of a better term). They have been around for only 2.5 years. This month, they shared a few numbers. Specifically:
Nothing here about voice and video, but I do know that the numbers here are impressive.
4. Amazon ChimeAmazon Chime is new to the scene of unified communications and already big.
Chime started as an acquisition only a year ago of a company called Biba. It was probably already well underway to become a replacement for Amazon’s own internal video conferencing services. At Amazon’s re:invent event last month, Amazon shared a few numbers of how they use Chime internally:
24.8 million minutes a month. That’s almost a million minutes a day. From Amazon’s internal meetings only. Not including any of their Chime customers.
Not as massive as the others, but still quite large.
One thing to note – this isn’t “pure” WebRTC. Amazon took the approach of supporting legacy video conferencing systems first, so they “did” something to WebRTC to make it work. Their roadmap for next year is to add direct browser for users as well. What we do know, is that this uses WebRTC technologies inside today already.
Oh… and I didn’t even mention Amazon Connect, Alexa and Mayday – all making use of WebRTC.
5. HousepartyHouseparty is huge. Especially if you’re a teen. My daughter will probably start using it in a few years… once she grows out of Whatsapp and Musical.ly. Or so I’ve been told.
Houseparty makes use of WebRTC, although it is a mobile only service.
There’s not much numbers going on about Houseparty this year, so I’ll stick to the ones we know from a year ago.
20 million minutes a day.
Enough said.
6. Appear.inAppear.in started as a summer internship project at Telenor Digital somewhere, growing up to this point in time. Today it got acquired by Videonor.
The service is a favorite of many in the WebRTC community (and elsewhere – they are doing million of minutes a day).
If you haven’t tried it yet, then you should: appear.in
And yes. It is in the league of the other vendors here when it comes to size.
7. GotomeetingThere are many traditional VoIP (interesting that VoIP can now be considered traditional) that have started adding WebRTC to their offerings.
Most can probably make it into this list of massive applications.
Out of them, I decided to choose GoToMeeting. Why? Because the integration they’ve done was quite a natural one. I’ve been using it for well over a year now whenever someone invited me into a meeting over GoToMeeting – in most cases, they weren’t even aware of the browser option.
8. Peer5I wanted to add a company that doesn’t do voice and video. Or rather ones that are making use of the WebRTC’s data channel.
The one I picked here was Peer5. It was the easiest for me to get numbers from (I am an advisor there).
The P2P CDN scene is getting quite interesting lately. Alongside the startups like Peer5 that are pushing the envelope we now see companies like Akamai who stated publicly that they are headed this way with WebRTC as well.
In this year’s Kranky Geek event, Hadar Weiss, Co-founder and CEO of Peer5, shared a few of their numbers:
1 billion connections a day is large. Compared to millions of minutes a day. But we have to remember – a lot of these connections are short-lived in nature (viewers reaching out to peers they might stream data from or to) and that the more interesting number, which isn’t publicly available yet, is about actual data traffic.
9. CPaaS vendorsCPaaS vendors drive this industry forwards. They do so for the smaller vendors as well as the largest ones.
Need examples?
In 2016, Twilio claimed to process “more than a billion minutes of WebRTC calls made through Twilio” as part of their launch of Voice Insights.
TokBox has stated this year that they power social video apps including Monkey, Houseparty, Fam and live.ly.
And they are not alone with it. There are 20+ such vendors catering to the needs of other developers.
Some of the CPaaS vendors can definitely be considered massive when it comes to the WebRTC traffic they generate.
10. Back to you nowI most definitely forgot a vendor or two here.
Scroll down and comment below with your 10th candidate for the massive application using WebRTC.
WebRTC is Still MinisculeLet’s look at some other engagement metrics out there.
Netflix shared their numbers for the year this month:
Netflix members around the world watched more than 140 million hours per day
Hours. Not minutes. In minutes? That’s 8.4 billion minutes a day. For a single vendor. Compared to WebRTC’s 214 million minutes a day on Chrome.
I’d say WebRTC has room to grow.
Here’s for a bigger 2018.
Looking for more vendors using WebRTC? Here are 10 interviews with inspiring vendors using WebRTC.
Download the eBook
The post 10 Massive Applications Using WebRTC appeared first on BlogGeek.me.
Kamailio v5.1.0 Released
WebRTC API Platform Pricing is… Complicated
Are you doing your WebRTC pricing per minute? per gigabyte? per device?
You’re a developer. You decide it is time to build an application. But you don’t really want to do everything from scratch. Hell – you don’t even want to maintain and update all of that media backend – what do you really know about video? So you go look for someone to do it for you, finding a nice set of vendors offering WebRTC PaaS services. You can easily plug into their SDK and in no time have your service do group calling.
You probably won’t be conquering the world as the next Whatsapp with such an approach, but getting that healthcare service up and running an education application or a visual contact center is now within easy reach.
And you won’t be alone in this either. About a third of the dataset of vendors using WebRTC that I am tracking is using third parties. Most of them use managed services.
But here comes the question. Do you know how much you’re going to pay for that WebRTC PaaS service?
I get requests to assist in vendor selection on a weekly basis. This has been going for a few years now. This year, one of the main focus areas in this process has been pricing. Or more accurately, understanding the pricing schemes or the different vendors, and comparing the costs of these vendors.
There’s no easy way to get that done…
Why?
- Because vendors have different pricing models
- Because you need to fully understand your scenario
- Because it just isn’t straightforward
Let’s review the 3 leading pricing parameters are going to dictate your costs:
MinutesThis one may seem easy.
You are going to pay for the number of minutes you use in a service.
It should be easy to calculate. Easy to understand the value (the more you use the more you pay).
But somehow, people translate minutes to the “old” days of telecom, where you paid top dollars to make phone calls. By the minute of course.
The devil is in the details here.
Here are few differences you’ll see between vendors.
- Is there a minimum allowance of minutes? In many cases, a baseline monthly fee will be requested. That monthly fee will include pre-calculated minutes that you can use. They will usually be priced at their cost value. This is:
- Seriousness fee. You pay so the vendor will spend the time necessary in answering your nagging support questions
- Signal to customers. If that fee is high (hundreds of dollars or more), it is meant to signal you they are interested in businesses with money to spend – probably enterprises: “we’re taking only premium customers”. The alternative of very low monthly fee indicates a stance of “we cater all developers and happy to embrace the long tail”
- Reduce noise. Non-paying”free-tier” customers are noise. Lots and lots of noise. They ask the most amount of questions, and usually these questions (and demands) won’t lead to a sale anyway. So vendors put some built-in must-pay price point to filter out the free riders who probably won’t help their bottom line anyway
- Flat rate? Tiered? Pre-commit? Call us? Different vendors offer different methods to offer better price points (discounts) based on usage. Here’s what I’ve seen vendors do:
- Flat rate. There’s a single price point. Take it or leave it. You just take the number, multiply it by the minutes and voila! You get your costs. It always comes with text saying that high volume pricing is available
- Tiered. First X minutes are free (included in the plan). Next Y minutes come at a certain price. Z following minutes are at a lower price point and so one. Later minutes cost you less
- Pre-commit. Commit in advance (and pay) for a certain number of minutes. If you pass that number, the low price point you already committed to will continue to apply
- Call us. Almost always there in all plans. For big enough customers, we will negotiate deals suitable for both sides
- What gets counted? Saying the price is per minute is nice, but what are these minutes counted against? Here are a few examples:
- Actual media minutes. This is a common approach. You got an SDK of the vendor connected to a session, the time starts ticking
- Connected devices. Then there’s the approach of connected devices. You are connected – you pay. Even if you send or receive nothing. This isn’t a common approach, but it does exist when the price per minute is low and combined with bandwidth payment (see below). It can also be tiered
- Subscriptions. See below
The great thing about minutes? They are easy to comprehend and count.
If you have 10 people in a call for 10 minutes – that’s 100 minutes (assuming we count per device here).
The downside is that with minutes, there’s usually less regard to what is done in that minute. A video minute is the same as a voice minute on most platforms when it comes to pricing. And a low resolution video minute is the same as a high resolution video minute.
SubscriptionsSubscriptions is related to minutes, and deals with the question of what it is you count the minutes against?
The two most common practices here is to count devices or count subscriptions.
Some of the WebRTC PaaS services work off the notion of a publish subscribe mechanism. Devices can publish media streams into a session, and devices can subscribe to media streams from the session. This is an elegant approach that can nicely be used when describing a complex scenario with asymmetric behaviors.
In an SFU group video call model, where each user publishes his own media streams and subscribes to the media streams of all other participants, the number of subscriptions grows at a polynomial rate: with N active users in a session, you’ll be counting N*(N-1) subscribed media streams.
In WebRTC PaaS, paying per subscribed minutes tends to be cheaper than paying per device minutes for lower group sizes (and vice versa)
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It makes sense for a vendor to apply a per-subscription price as in many cases, his own costs are probably tightly coupled with the number of media subscriptions in the system.
Subscriptions are slightly harder to count than devices, but it is still gives you a solid number and an easy estimate.
BandwidthThe main complaint about per minute pricing is that it is a reminder of the old telecom days. The notion was that once we go for VoIP, cloud, web, WebRTC or whatever you want to call it, you can price it closer to the usage and not stay at the high level of a minute concept.
If you AppRTC, Google’s “hello world” implementation of WebRTC, you can easily get 2.5mbps in each direction over a 720p or full HD resolution using VP8. Audio only? That would normally take 40kbps:
If it was limited only to the difference between audio and video then so be it. Give two price points per minute and you’re done. But video is different. It becomes more of a hassle with video. You can probably get video going with as little as 300kbps with 10-20mbps being applicable to 4K video resolutions. That’s not including things like 360 videos and other crazy trends like 8K or 10K resolutions that were just added to the HDMI spec.
So vendors are now looking into taking the route that is so common in IaaS – pricing per bandwidth processed.
Usually, that would be subscribed bandwidth. The reason for that is that cloud services usually cost the vendor based on the bandwidth he sends to browsers and mobile devices and not for bandwidth it receives on its cloud servers.
Here are a few quick things to validate in this price schemes:
- Is price calculated on subscribed bandwidth only or on both send and receive?
- If media gets routed towards the vendor (recording or SFU usually) AND the session needs to be relayed via a TURN server. Do you count the costs of TURN related traffic AND server processing traffic?
Note that if you’re doing peer-to-peer sessions (that means doing a 1-on-1 session where you don’t want media to go through the vendor’s servers), you won’t be paying for bandwidth at all – unless the media gets relayed via TURN. TURN relay depends on network conditions and can’t be estimated properly (highly reliant on your users), but a rule of thumb of 15-20% of the sessions is usually used here.
Paying per bandwidth will tend to be cheaper than by minute. The reason is that the end result will be tailored to your exact usage pattern. That said, there are several downsides here:
- It is usually hard to estimate in advance, as translating minutes of use to bandwidth isn’t straightforward
- Different services will give different bitrates for seemingly the same service (I am working for a customer now, looking into the differences across many group video services, and it is devilishly hard to find commonality across the applications)
- It is harder to calculate than the rest, and it usually contains also a per minute counting to go alongside the bandwidth calculation
Going for this IaaS type of a model is a great way to lower price points for customers, but at the same time it is a great way of dealing them with a huge headache.
At testRTC, I’ve been trying for some time now with my colleagues there to estimate what are costs are/should be. How much will we end up paying for our IaaS vendors every month? It is so hard, that I usually can’t even understand the detailed invoices we receive at the end of each month. I fear that the same is/will occur with per bandwidth pricing in WebRTC PaaS.
Where Do We Go From Here?In the latest update to my WebRTC PaaS report I’ve included a new appendix explaining pricing models in this space.
But the coolest thing yet was the inclusion of a new tool – a price calculator.
It is probably the 4th or 5th that I’ve created in 2017, each with its own nuances, target use cases and complexities.
This one was meant to be as generic and as simple as possible.
You enter the expected number of sessions you plan to have on a monthly basis, the number of users and the bandwidth per stream (there are a few suggested values in there).
Then you enter the pricing model and the price points of the vendors you want to compare, and the result will be the expected monthly cost you’ll have for each vendor.
Need something a bit more tailored? Reach out to me and I’ll help you out.
The post WebRTC API Platform Pricing is… Complicated appeared first on BlogGeek.me.
My WebRTC PaaS Report: December Release
This latest update of my WebRTC PaaS report brings with it new vendors as well as a new price calculator.
It is becoming a ritual. Every 8 months or so I update the WebRTC PaaS (or CPaaS) report.
Every time I am surprised by the changes that occur. They come in 4 different areas:
- There are new vendors joining this market
- There are old vendors leaving this market
- There are changes in the feature set of existing vendors already covered in the report
- There are new trends that needs to be covered
How did we do since last time?
New Vendors Covered ECLWebRTC by NTT CommunicationsI’ve been watching the work done by NTT Communications for quite some time. It started as a project that has signaling capabilities in it. At the time, they called it SkyWay.
Later on, they developed and added an SFU into the mix.
In September 2017 they decided to open up their platform globally. That’s the point where it made sense to add them to the report.
PhenixPhenix has been an enigma to me in the past two years.
From afar, it looked like a vendor trying to go after the broadcast market with a low latency technology based on WebRTC. Recently they approached me to explain what it is that they do and to check if it fits into this report.
And it did.
Phenix is focused on the large scale interactive streaming sessions. Places where you want to pick one or a few broadcasters and have their interactions shared with a larger audience.
Vendors Closing DoorsWe had those as well.
Tropo by CiscoAcquisitions of a WebRTC CPaaS vendor is sometimes beneficial and sometimes terrible for its customers.
TokBox’ acquisition by Telefonica was a good thing.
Tropo’s acquisition by Cisco… not so much.
Two years after its acquisition, Tropo closed doors to new customers. The signs were out there, since the platform didn’t really evolve. The service is still up and running, but I don’t think Tropo customers are happy to be using Tropo right now, and I don’t think Tropo/Cisco are happy to be needing to serve these customers. A lose-lose situation here.
Cisco simply pivoted. They decided that Tropo was not the right strategy and wanted to double down on Cisco Spark APIs and developer ecosystem.
forge by XuraForge is another sad story of our industry.
Starting life as Crocodile RCS, it has been acquired by Acision. Acision was acquired by Comverse. Which got rebranded to Xura. Which was taken off the market by Siris Capital.
Forge, and probably other assets of Xura were just collateral damage in this process.
M&A and Pivots in WebRTC PaaS Apidaze acquired by VoIP InnovationsVoIP Innovations acquired Apidaze. This is a good signal for the platform’s health. Looking at the investment section of Apidaze’ 4-pager in my report shows the story:
A lot of the attention and focus was taken from Apidaze API platform and put towards Ottspot, a “slack business phone app”.
This acquisition by VoIP Innovations might mean a renewed focus on the Apidaze platform and the developers who use it.
TrueVoice is now VoxeetTrueVoice was added to the report earlier this year. At the time, Voxeet added it as another product offering. This time around, Voxeet is making the APIs the main product.
This caused the TrueVoice brand to be removed, and Voxeet to be the actual thing.
Building a platform for developers is an all consuming process. Larger companies might be able to cope with doing that in parallel to other activities, but the smaller vendors will struggle. The fact that Voxeet decided to pivot and focus on developers is a good sign.
Putting it all in a VisualHere’s what it means visually:
2 in. 2 out. A few minor changes elsewhere.
The report shows the transitions in this market since 2014.
What’s in the report?The report is quite long. It now contains 223 pages. This includes:
- The explanation of WebRTC from the point of view of someone who has a build vs buy decision to make
- KPIs to use in the selection process – and why they should matter to you
- Vendor sections (20 of them) – 4 pages per vendor
- Old vendors – to give an understanding of why they “left” the market, and maybe use it as signals to the existing vendors and their future stability
- Appendixes. 9 of them
Want to get a sneak peak into the report? You can check out these two PDF resources:
As you can see, this time, TokBox were kind enough to sponsor their 4-pager of the report and have it publicly available.
Here’s what Badri Rajasekar, TokBox CTO had to say:
2017 has been a big year for WebRTC. In what many considered a very significant piece of the puzzle, Apple announced support for WebRTC in Safari, finally allowing developers to use WebRTC on any browser platform. At the same time, we’ve seen a surge in adoption of live video communications driven in part by consumer demand. BlogGeek.me’s evaluation of this market is a valuable read for those looking for snapshot of this year’s trends in WebRTC.
Check out TokBox 4-pager from the report. You can expect to see 19 other such detailed profiles of the other vendors that the report covers.
Report ToolsThe report doesn’t come only as a “standalone” PDF file. You can access to a few additional tools:
- Price calculator – an Excel sheet designed to make it easier to estimate your costs using different vendors
- Online vendors comparison matrix – an online comparison matrix you can use to quickly validate which vendors offer the feature set and capabilities you need
- Vendor selection blueprint – an Excel sheet and Word workbook with a step-by-step guide on how to narrow down and score vendors for your application
- Presentation visuals – the presentation visuals from the report, easily available for use in your own internal or external presentations
There’s a ton more in the report, and work I do with vendors in this space – those offering such services, looking to offer such services or want to use these services.
Feel free to reach out to me or to enquire further about the report.
The post My WebRTC PaaS Report: December Release appeared first on BlogGeek.me.
The Makeup of a WebRTC API Platform
WebRTC API Platforms are different than the classic/legacy/common CPaaS.
As I am working on getting the final TBDs in my upcoming report update on Choosing a WebRTC API Platform, I wanted to share something that may seem obvious, but probably isn’t.
When talking about CPaaS, WebRTC brings with it something more than just accessibility from the browser.
Here’s the makeup of a CPaaS platform:
There’s backend telephony in there, built out of some VoIP server components, connected to the carriers to handle things like phone numbers and actual calling.
Developers connect to that backend via REST APIs, or some other form of scripting interface.
Latencies and wait times aren’t important for the most part, so the CPaaS vendor doesn’t need to be spread across the globe to provide the service. A couple of data centers for redundancy and some reduction in latencies is usually enough.
Here’s what a WebRTC API platform looks like:
There might or might not be REST APIs. they are important, but definitely aren’t the main way developers interact with the system. That’s done via the SDKs. The SDKs are wrappers around the REST APIs or some other interface (probably WebSocket based), allowing getting the actual media and processing it as part of the SDK – either in the browser or on a mobile device.
And then there’s the backend. Signaling and NAT traversal are rather mandatory. Without them, this won’t be a WebRTC API platform. In the majority of the cases, you’ll also have access to an SFU, allowing you to support group video calls. All that backend? Especially the media parts of NAT traversal and SFU? They have to be as close to the end user as possible, so these platforms often deploy globally, on all possible data centers of a cloud provider (think AWS or GCE) and sometimes running on multiple cloud providers to increase their reach.
The difference then?
- SDK that handles actual media processing; with less focus on REST APIs
- Globally spread backend, to reduce latencies
There’s a challenge selling to developers. They tend to underestimate the effort involved. And they usually prefer building new shiny toys than polishing and maintaining something that’s working. This is made worse by the seemingly “easy” fashion by which you can get a WebRTC peer-to-peer call happen inside a browser between two tabs. It gives the impression that developing and running WebRTC at scale is trivial.
Especially when you compare it to connecting to a phone number and dialing it. Doing this via an API is easy. But how do you go about dialing out a number on your own without the assistance of CPaaS? Is there a really simple example of this? Not really. This requires more than just programming – the value here is the accessibility to the phone network, which is considered a royal ongoing headache. So it is easy to outsource and to understand its value.
Here’s how the thinking goes:
SDKs? Sure. We can write them.
Signaling? I found a project on github that looks popular enough.
NAT Traversal? Everyone’s already using coturn. Should be simple enough to get it up and running.
SFU? Just passing data around. Can be written in a weekend.
Will WebRTC API Platform vendors be able to overcome this challenge? How can this be explained to developers? There is a lot that goes into building such a platform. More than the mere initial technical hurdles.
Browsers are changing. There are now 4 of them that have “support” for WebRTC. That support is different between browsers. New browser versions break things that used to work before. The specification is being finalized now, but no browser supports it yet.
Media backends need to be maintained. Monitored. Updated. Secured. In an ongoing basis.
In the coming years we will see a shift from H.264 and VP8 video codecs to VP9, HEVC and/or AV1 video codecs. This will require additional investment in the infrastructure.
And still it is believed to be easy and simple.
It isn’t.
Planning on Launching Your Own WebRTC API Platform?If you are planning to launch your own WebRTC API Platform, then you should know what you’re up against.
In the past 4 years I’ve been looking at this market, analyzing it. Seeing it grow and mature. The report covers 20+ vendors offering WebRTC API Platforms. Most of the are active. A few died or got acquired and taken off market.
One of the things to note is how new WebRTC API Platform vendors make their decision to launch their service. What do they decide to include in their initial launch. What do they use as differentiating factors from the existing players.
The space is rather crowded already, even if no clear winner exists yet.
Make sure to do your homework here. Understand what you’re up against and why should developers come to you and not to others. And plan for the long run.
Planning to Use a WebRTC API Platform?If you are in the build vs buy decision point, then think of the alternative costs of each approach. Also figure out your time to market and each and the risk of failure. For new projects, I tend to suggest a platform instead of self development. It reduces risk and upfront costs, but more than that, it enables experimenting and proving the business before committing too much into the project.
If you decided to build on your own, make sure your reasoning is rock solid. If the only reason is cost, then I suggest you recalculate.
If you decided to buy into a platform instead, then pick a platform that fits your need. But make sure it is here to stay as much as you can – this market is dynamic and is bound to stay that way for a few more years.
The Report UpdateThe updated report will get published later this week.
If you want to learn more about it, just contact me.
The post The Makeup of a WebRTC API Platform appeared first on BlogGeek.me.
Computer Vision on the Web with WebRTC and TensorFlow
TensorFlow is one of the most popular Machine Learning frameworks out there – probably THE most popular one. One of the great things about TensorFlow is that many libraries are actively maintained and updated. One of my favorites is the TensorFlow Object Detection API. The Tensorflow Object Detection API classifies and provides the location of multiple […]
The post Computer Vision on the Web with WebRTC and TensorFlow appeared first on webrtcHacks.
Dispatcher Latency Stats Monitoring With Statsd
import subprocess
from time import sleep
import time
# URI: sip:10.10.1.1:5060
#0 FLAGS: AP
#1 PRIORITY: 12
#2 LATENCY: {
#3 AVG: 30.529000
#4 STD: 4.849000
#5 EST: 30.999000
#6 MAX: 1270
#7 TIMEOUT: 0
def server_stats(ip):
idx = -1
for line in dlist.splitlines():
if idx == 5:
est_latency = line.strip()
if idx == 7:
timeout = line.strip()
if idx >= 0:
idx = idx + 1
if line.find("URI: sip:{}".format(ip)) > 0:
idx = 0
if timeout[:9] == "TIMEOUT: ":
timeout_count = timeout[9:]
cmd = "echo \"fastlink.timeout.{}:{}|g\" | nc -w 1 -u 127.0.0.1 8125".format(ip, timeout_count)
subprocess.call(cmd, shell=True)
print(cmd)
if est_latency[:5] == "EST: ":
latency = est_latency[5:]
cmd = "echo \"fastlink.latency.{}:{}|g\" | nc -w 1 -u 127.0.0.1 8125".format(ip, latency)
subprocess.call(cmd, shell=True)
print("est latency:{}".format(latency))
servers = ["10.40.5.175", "10.40.2.233", "10.40.1.103"]
interval = 10
it = 0
while it < 6:
# while 1:
ts = time.time()
print("[{}]now:{}".format(it,ts))
next_ts = ts + 10
it = it + 1
dlist = subprocess.check_output(["/usr/bin/docker","exec","kamailio","kamcmd","dispatcher.list"])
for ip in servers:
print(ip)
server_stats(ip)
ts = time.time()
print("sleeping:{}".format(next_ts - ts))
wait_ts = next_ts - ts;
if wait_ts < 0:
wait_ts = 7
sleep(wait_ts)You can see the message on the mailing list as well as the attached Python script at:Thanks for flying Kamailio!
Are You Listed in the WebRTC Index?
WebRTC Index has been around for 3 years now. Are you listed?
I don’t remember whose idea was it, but by the end of 2014, I’ve launched along with Amir Zmora the WebRTC Index.
The idea behind it was quite simple. We create a place where someone can come and publish his company and its services – assuming they are related to WebRTC. The list grew, and now stands at 250 published vendors.
What we also did, was make sure the site is sustainable (there’s work to be done to keep it up to date). We chose the sponsorship approach:
Vendors can be listed freely in the index, but if you are a sponsor, then you get a bit of extra juice. You appear on the main page as a sponsor, get listed first on relevant search results, and get a few more ways to express what it is you offer on your own page.
What the WebRTC Index turned out into is a place to search for relevant vendors to assist people in understanding the industry and to pick up someone to work with.
And here comes my question to you?
Are you listed in the WebRTC Index?
Got check – http://webrtcindex.com/
I’ll sit and wait here. In the dark. Next to the nameless virtual machine that is hosting this website of mine.
Not there? Then read on…
How can you join the WebRTC Index?The system is easy and works as a manual process.
- Go to https://webrtcindex.com and check if your company is already listed
- If it isn’t, then just press the red button saying “Add your company”:
- Fill out the Google Form you reached
- Wait a couple of days (a week tops – I promise) – until you get an email with your listing
It really is that simple.
And it is a free process – no need to pay anything to join the list.
So why wait?
The post Are You Listed in the WebRTC Index? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.
Is the Future of CPaaS Serverless?
Twilio isn’t the first CPaaS vendor to offer serverless. And it definitely won’t be the last. Expect serverless CPaaS offerings in the future.
When I started researching for my first WebRTC API platforms report, one of the vendors I looked at was Voximplant. One of the things they referred me to was something they call VoxEngine. As its web page describes it, it is “an application engine that runs your apps inside the VoxImplant cloud” = Serverless.
I liked the idea, but didn’t think much of it at the time. It was rather new anyway.
What is Serverless Computing?If you haven’t been following the API scene, then you might have missed the notion of serverless computing. It is a concept where the code you write gets executed by the cloud. Directly. No need to run your own OS, VM or whatever container. Write the code. And it runs. Magically.
If you look at the compute models of XaaS, here’s the picture you’ll probably find:
- If you use On Premise, then you’re in charge of EVERYTHING
- With IaaS, everything up to the operating system is something “someone else” is taking care of. Amazon, Google, Microsoft or someone else entirely
- Then there’s PaaS. With it, everything up to the runtime is something “done for you”. Your data and application are yours to worry about. You connect with the runtime via APIs (not always, more quite common)
- SaaS is just getting the whole thing out of the box. Not our worry here
Where would Serverless fit in?
With Serverless, you write the “Application” but it and its data get handled and maintained by someone else.
What do you gain out of it?
- Scalability – you no longer need to care about it. Someone else now does that for you. You wrote the core logic of what you want to achieve, and the platform hosting your code is the one that needs to sweat it when it comes to scaling the thing as needed
- Maintenance – less code means you have less to maintain. And you’re shedding here all the boring work of getting the thing to work. In a way, you’re writing the initial prototype, and have it run in production
- Security – assuming the PaaS vendor handles the headache of security well, then you have less to deal with here
- Time to market – less to write also means faster time to market. It will take you less time to get that application in the hands of customers
- Latency – since the code runs directly on top of the PaaS APIs, on the servers of the same vendor, there a lot less latency involved in the API calls. Might be important, or might not be – just a fact
What do we have here then? Economies of scale at play. The vendor doing PaaS is already handling scalability, maintenance and security for you and a lot of other customers, so theoretically, he is doing and can do a better job of it than you can in the long run. This free you up to focus more on the user experience, ending with a better application and faster time to market. And there’s the added benefit of where the code is running (closer to the rest of the code).
Serverless = FunctionsWhile Serverless is the popular name, there’s another one that has been coined – FaaS – Functions as a Service; which then made it into the names of many of these products: Google Cloud Functions, PubNub Functions and Twilio Function to name a few.
The most widely known example is probably AWS Lambda; and then there’s the open source project Apache OpenWhisk.
Many API vendors now are starting to offer these serverless capabilities – so now you no longer need to have a server of your own connected to their service – you can just run your code in their XXX Functions product instead.
In some cases, using these Functions product is free, while in most cases, there’s a usage based payment model on running these Functions.
Serverless CPaaSBack to CPaaS and where serverless fits.
I think there are only two vendors in the CPaaS market today who are offering serverless (If I missed anyone – please share in the comments below):
- Voximplant, via their VoxEngine
- Twilio Functions
In the last Twilio Signal event in London, Jeff Lawson mentioned that Functions was Twilio’s fastest growing product since its launch, so there must be a market for that.
CPaaS is slightly more complex these days, so it is important to see what serverless fits first. Let’s split CPaaS into a couple of API layers and products:
API Layers
Products
- SMS and voice (via phone numbers)
- IP messaging, chat and omnichannel messaging
- VoIP (voice and video via WebRTC)
In some ways, the proprietary scripting language API layer can be viewed as a crude form of serverless. You state your needs inside a piece of script that indicates the flow of actions to take on events, offering it as response to webhooks from the CPaaS vendor.
The REST APIs are those that are easily usable within a serverless environment. Instead of making remote calls via APIs from one server to another, handling things like security, authentication and scale, you just run the call as close as possible to its destination.
And then there’s the client SDKs. These run on the target devices themselves, and it is hard to see how you can translate them into serverless – they are already built to communicate with the CPaaS vendor’s backend, so they’re out of scope here.
Since CPaaS products are roughly aligned by the types of API layers that are used for them, we can reach the following conclusions:
A few things to note here:
- IP Messaging makes more sense to run in serverless computing when traffic is high and latency is important
- Latency is usually less of an issue when it comes to SMS and voice
- VoIP has its own set of solutions other than serverless. These usually come in the form of pre-built widgets and iframes (but that’s for another article)
From a vendor’s perspective, serverless is now becoming important.
Why?
Simply because it is part of Twilio’s runtime offering. And one that Twilio states is growing rapidly. I wouldn’t want to be left behind as a competitor.
Why not use an IaaS vendor’s FaaS offering?Just had to put these two in the same sentence.
Since the dominant IaaS vendors (Azure, AWS and Google Cloud) all have a serverless offering, why do you need one in CPaaS? Can’t you just connect the IaaS one to the CPaaS one?
You most certainly can. But you will be using two different vendors now. And to some extent, using something like AWS Lambda only makes sense if you are already making use of multiple AWS services.
Assuming what you do gravitates around communications, then using a Serverless CPaaS product makes more sense. It will bring with it reduced latency and improved security over using an external serverless product.
Serverless is coming to CPaaSLike it or not, serverless is coming to CPaaS.
If you are a CPaaS vendor and you are asking yourself what’s next – make sure you’ve got serverless in your offering or your immediate roadmap.
If you are a developer using CPaaS – see if serverless can help you develop your application faster.
Selecting a CPaaS vendor for your WebRTC application? Check out my WebRTC APIs reportThe post Is the Future of CPaaS Serverless? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.
How WebRTC Works?
WebRTC has many moving parts in it.
When WebRTC works it seems like magic. You point your browser to a URL. Get someone else to point his browser to a URL – and – you now see each other.
How cool can that be?
If you look below the hood, there’s a lot going on in there.
Looking for a WebRTC course to dig deeper and build a solid architecture for your product?
I’ll try to give the explanation of how WebRTC works in a few different angles here. Together, they should create a pretty good picture of what’s going on.
WebRTC Basic ConceptHere’s the first thing I usually say about WebRTC:
WebRTC is the means to drive real time communications (voice, video and arbitrary data) directly inside a web browser. No need for any plugin or download to do that.
From a different perspective, WebRTC is just a media engine with a JavaScript API on top of it, so everyone knows how to use it (although browser implementations still varies from one another).
Somehow, that’s not saying much.
So let’s start with what makes WebRTC truly unique from a browser perspective.
If up until now, when you thought of a web application you were thinking client and server –
You have the browser as a client. It connects to the server to ask for stuff. Lets call these things requests. And the server obliged by sending responses. We’ve grown beyond that using WebSockets, but it still is rather the same. If I want to send a message to a friend who is looking at his own browser just now, the message needs to go to the server and from there to my friend. Much like the post office works.
WebRTC is where browsers and HTML diverges from this paradigm:
While we still need to somehow signal from one browser to the other so we will be able to locate each other, once that signaling is over, we can send them messages directly between the two browsers – without the web server ever touching the messages. Magic.
This is why many refer to WebRTC as a peer-to-peer technology. Or P2P in short. Because browsers can communicate directly.
Separation of Signaling and MediaWhen loading web pages, we are now used to the fact that the browser goes fetching a 100 different resources just to render a web page. These resources can come from various different servers – the host of the page, a CDN holding static files and a few third party sites. That said, this will mostly boil down to three types of files:
- HTML and CSS, which makeup the main content of the site and its style
- JS, which is usually there to run the interactive part of the website
- Image files and other similar resources
It ends up being a mixture of static stuff and a bit of code to hold it all together.
WebRTC is… different.
It requires two types of interactions that go over the network. Signaling and media.
Signaling takes place over an HTTPS connection or a websocket. It is implemented via JS code. What you do in signaling is decide how the users are going to find each other and start a conversation.
One important thing about signaling – it isn’t part of WebRTC itself. The developer is left to decide how to pass the information needed to create a WebRTC session. WebRTC will generate the bits of information it needs to send and process such bits of information that gets received but it won’t really do anything over the network about them. These bits of information are packed into SDP messages by WebRTC today.
The actual media goes off on a very different medium and connection. It goes through “media channels”. These use either SRTP (for voice and video) or SCTP (for the data channel).
Media takes a different route than signaling over the network and behaves very differently. This is true for the browser, the network AND the servers you need to make it work.
Audio and VideoAudio and video is the main thing you’ll notice with WebRTC. It is also what gets showcased in almost all demos and examples of WebRTC.
The reason for that is simple – video is VERY visual and interactive.
Audio and video in WebRTC works by using codecs. These are known algorithms that are used to compress and decompress audio and video data. There are different codecs you can use in WebRTC and I won’t get into it now.
Audio and video also gets interesting because it is sent with low latency in mind. If packets get lost along the way due to network issues – it might not be worth retransmitting them (another first in the HTML).
WebRTC uses known VoIP techniques to get media processed and sent through the network, and this is all done over SRTP – the secure and encrypted version of RTP. WebRTC did make some minor changes by using specific mechanisms in SRTP that were not in wide use before, making it a bit harder to interoperate with if you have a VoIP service deployed already.
Data tooYou can also send arbitrary data with WebRTC. This is done over what’s called the data channel in WebRTC.
The data channel can be used when what you want to do is send direct messages between browsers without going through any server (you may still need to relay it through a TURN server though).
NAT TraversalBeing able to communicate directly across browsers is great, but it doesn’t always work.
The internet was built on the client-server paradigm some 30-40 years ago. Since then it has changed somewhat. Today, most users access the internet from behind a firewall or a NAT. These devices usually change the IP address of the user’s device and mask it from the open web. This masking can be just that, or it can also offer some measure of “protection” where unsolicited traffic is not allowed towards the user’s device. The problem with this approach, is that WebRTC uses different mediums for signaling and media so understanding what’s solicited and what’s unsolicited traffic isn’t easy.
Furthermore, there are enterprises who make it a point not to let any type of traffic into (or out of) their network without vetting it.
Which brings us to these types of scenarios:
The guy there on the left? He now might actually know the public IP address of the guy on the right due to that STUN request that was made. But the public IP address might only be opened to the STUN server and having anyone else try to connect through that “pinhole” that was created may still fail.
In order to overcome these issues, a user’s device will not be able to directly communicate with another device located inside some other private network. And the workaround for that is to relay that blocked media through a public server. This is the whole purpose of TURN servers:
You can expect anywhere between 5-20% of your sessions to require the use of TURN servers.
Due to this complication, a WebRTC session takes the following steps:
- Send out an SDP offer to a web server. This SDP message outlines what are the media channels the device wants to exchange and how to find them
- Receive an SDP answer via the web server from the other device. Remember that that other device may be a media server
- Initiate a procedure called ICE negotiation, meant to find out if the devices are reachable directly, peer-to-peer or do they require media relay via TURN. This process is best done using trickle ICE, but that’s for another day
- Once done, media flows directly between the devices
All this mucking around requires asynchronous programming on the browser using JS code and can be done using JavaScript promises. On the server side, you can use whatever you want to manage media and signaling.
Oftentimes, developers won’t develop directly against the WebRTC APIs and will use third party frameworks and modules to do that for them – open source or commercial.
Quick Recap- WebRTC sends data directly across browsers – P2P
- It can send audio, video or arbitrary data in real time
- It needs to use NAT traversal mechanisms for browsers to reach each other
- Sometimes, P2P must go through a relay server (TURN)
- With WebRTC you need to think about signaling and media. They are separate from one another
- P2P is not mandated. It is just possible. You can place media servers if and when you need them. It “breaks” P2P, but we’re looking to solve problems, not write an academic dissertation
- Servers you’ll need in a WebRTC product:
- Signaling server (either as part of your application server or as a separate entity)
- STUN/TURN servers (that’s what gets used for NAT traversal
- Media servers (optional. Only if your use case calls for it)
WebRTC has 3 main API groups:
getUserMediagetUserMedia is in charge of giving the user access to the camera, microphone and screen. It alone gives value for those who need to do things locally, without implementing real time conversations.
Here are a few uses of standalone-getUserMedia:
- Take a user’s profile picture
- Collect audio samples and send them to a speech to text engine
- Record audio and video with no quality degradation due to packet loss
I am sure you can come up with more uses to it.
PeerConnectionPeerConnection is at the heart of WebRTC and the most complex to implement and to understand. In a way, it does EVERYTHING.
- It handles all the SDP message exchange (not sending them through the network itself, but generating them and processing the incoming ones).
- It implements ICE in order to connect the media channels, going through TURN relays if needed
- It encodes and decodes the audio and video data in realtime
- It sends and receives the media over the network
- It handles network issues by employing adaptive jitter buffer, bandwidth estimation, packet loss concealment, forward error correction and other algorithms that you really don’t want to know, but eventually will need to learn
- It handles local audio issues using algorithms such as acoustic echo cancellation
Much of what goes on inside peer connection that affects the resulting media quality is based on heuristics. A specific set of arbitrary rules. Different implementations may have different behaviors and different media quality due to this.
DataChannelI’ve discussed the data channel somewhat earlier.
The only thing to add here is that:
- Data channels can be configured to be reliable or unreliable. If you set them to unreliable then messages will not be automatically retransmitted on them. Sometimes, that would be your preference. They can also be configured to be ordered or unordered in the way they deliver messages
- Data channels were designed to work on the API level similar to WebSocket, so once you open it, you can think about it in a similar fashion.
You can find a few ideas of what people are doing with data channels here. There are more ways you can make use of it.
The WebRTC Implementer’s ViewpointIf what you’re looking for is to implement an application that makes use of WebRTC, then here are some activities you’ll need to deal with:
- Client side
- Signaling
- NAT traversal
- Media
Before you continue, you may want to check out this article about programming languages in WebRTC.
Client SideThe client side can be a browser, mobile application, PC application or an embedded device.
For web browsers, you’ll be developing using JavaScript. Either using WebRTC’s APIs directly (unlikely) or by using an existing framework of sorts (github is where many people start – just make sure you pick something popular that got updated recently).
For mobile applications, this is mostly about finding an SDK you’re comfortable with. There are again a few available on github, along with the official ones coming from Google for iOS and Android. There are also some commercial mobile SDK out there that are pretty good.
You can go for a PC application. Most do it by using Electron. And there’s also the embedded approach, which means either taking the official Google WebRTC codebase and porting it to whatever device you have or developing something on your own – I’ve seen both approaches work.
SignalingYou will need a signaling server. The first thing a WebRTC client will do is call the mothership. That is used to coordinate whatever session you have in mind for it.
The signaling server isn’t in the scope of the WebRTC specification so it is up to you to figure out what to use here. Most of the code you’ll find in the github for the browser client is actually going to be an implementation of a signaling server.
Remember that the signaling server can be separate from your web server or they can reside within the same process – up to you. And in any case, the first thing to do is to check if there’s already some kind of a signaling mechanism that you have in place for your application for things that aren’t WebRTC. You might be able to piggyback your SDP messages and other WebRTC related signaling over that mechanism (I know that’s what I’d try to do first).
NAT TraversalFor NAT traversal you will need to deploy STUN/TURN servers.
We’ll first start with what NOT to do:
- Don’t assume you won’t be needing TURN
- Don’t use public STUN servers
- Don’t have a single server for everything
- Don’t start by building a world-class global network of servers. You’ll get there, but it can wait
Now what you should do:
- Deploy STUN and TURN in the same server. On the same process
- Use coturn. That’s what everyone else is using
- Or instead, just get a hosted NAT traversal service from someone. XirSys and Twilio are good alternatives
if you are planning on group voice and video sessions, connectivity to PSTN or other networks, recording or other fancy features, then media servers are in your immediate future.
Look for something that fits well with your use case.
I’d even say start here before picking anything else in your technology stack.
There are a few open source and commercial alternatives out there. They are different from one another in many ways.
Looking for a WebRTC Training?The purpose of this article is to get you the most basic understanding of WebRTC if you’re a newb. I didn’t want to take the approach of building a “hello world” application – you can find many of these on the internet already. What I wanted to do instead is go somewhat higher and take a look at the bigger picture – you’ll be needing it soon enough.
In many cases, people start with a “hello world” implementation of WebRTC and try to fit it to their own scenario. I find that it is the wrong way in many cases, as it all depends on what it is you are trying to build – it will dictate the starting point you’ll need to make in your journey.
Spend the time to read this article, and then go read a “hello world” manual or two for WebRTC. It will make it a lot more effective if you do.
Looking for a WebRTC course to dig deeper and build a solid architecture for your product?
The post How WebRTC Works? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.
Jeff Lawson on the Past, Present and Future of Programmable Communications
An interview with Jeff Lawson, Co-founder and CEO of Twilio.
After going to Twilio Signal event in London in September, I was asked by Twilio’s analyst relations about the event. I shared my thoughts in a lengthy article already, so it was easy to send out a link.
I did one more thing.
I decided to ask her if I can interview Jeff Lawson in person the next time I’ll be in San Francisco (which happened to be the following month during Kranky Geek). My expectation was to be ignored, or to just be declined.
But when she came back with an approval… I was clueless as to how to proceed.
We ended up deciding together on a recorded video interview.I was given free reign as to what questions to ask, with the request to share them if possible before the interview. No restrictions were placed. I reached out to a few friends asking for their thoughts of good questions, added a few of mine and prepared for the interview.
Jeff gave me his full attention for the better part of an hour. I ended up using everything we recorded – not removing any of the answers.
The result? A longish interview of around 37 minutes. I’ve added the transcript below the interview as well, if you’re more of a textual person.
I’d like to thank Jeff and the team at Twilio that made this one happen.
TranscriptTsahi Levent-Levi: Good morning, Jeff.
Jeff Lawson: Good morning.
Tsahi: Okay. I’d like to start with something, a question that I was very interested in. You have two kids, right?
Jeff: Yeah.
Tsahi: Are they young?
Jeff: Yeah.
Tsahi: How do you explain to them what you do every day?
Jeff: That’s a great question. It’s hard to explain to a young kid what Twilio is, but here’s what I’ve found is they use their phones … They don’t use their phones. They steal our phones, but the only thing we really let them do is communicate. If you think about it, that’s the very first thing that a kid wants to do. Call Grandma, and I’ll FaceTime Grandma from the phone. I explain that Twilio … Twilio is a technology. We let everybody who wants to be able to build things that communicate, we let them do that.
Tsahi: Okay. So that’s CPaaS in a way, right?
Jeff: CPaaS. Yeah. In an essence, we let companies call Grandma.
Tsahi: Yes. Okay. Letting companies call Grandma. I’ll tell that to my daughter.
Jeff: If Grandma is your customer and you need to engage with her.
Tsahi: Yes. When you started Twilio, like nine or 10 years ago, what was the original vision behind it? I guess it was slightly different than what it is today.
Jeff: It’s actually pretty similar to what it is today, I have to say. We started Twilio because I’m a software developer. I’ve been a developer for 20 years, and I also started multiple companies prior to Twilio. At each company, a common thread arose. At every single one of those companies, first of all, we were using the power of software to build a customer experience that was better than anything in the industry that had come before us.
I had started a variety of companies. An academic content company for college students online, StubHub, the online ticket exchange for secondhand tickets, and a brick and mortar retailer, of all things. The common thread among all of these was we were using software to build a great customer experience. We were using software to build amazing web applications, to represent the business, to enable us to touch customers. StubHub is the whole ability just to be able to connect folks together to buy and sell tickets. Software was key to that, and the key of software is agility. The ability to constantly iterate, constantly listen to your customers, put something out there in the world that you think solves a problem for them, get feedback and iterate. Sprint over sprint, every couple of weeks, you’re putting out something better, learning from your customers. That’s the super power of software. In every one of those companies, I had another problem. At some point or another, I had always needed to reach out and communicate with my customers. Just makes sense. Every time it happened, I said, “Well, that’s neat, but I’m a software developer. What do I know about making the phone ring?” That’s like magic. I have no idea how that works.
So I’d go to the industry, and I’d say, “How are we supposed to build this idea that we have?” We want to integrate with these systems. I have this idea for how I want to touch our customers, and the industry would say, “Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. We think we can help you with that. First thing, let’s pull a bunch of copper wires from the carrier to your data center. Then we’re going to rack up a bunch of carrier gear in your data center, and then, let’s see. None of this was designed to do this idea you have, so we’re going to bring in this professional services army. They need to come integrate it, and they’re going to beat up all that equipment and get it to work and do exactly what you want. That will take about two million bucks, and it will take a couple of years to build. Sign here.”
Every time, I remember thinking, “Huh. First of all, millions of dollars for this one part of my customer experience? That’s a lot of money. I don’t think I have that, but if it’s not for the money, though, what’s much more important? The time.” Think about it. Two years before I get version one in front of my customers, before I get that prototype in front of my customers? Get any feedback whatsoever? That’s insane. To software people, to spend two years before you get anything in front of a customer? That’s crazy.
After having that experience at three companies in a row over the course of 10 years, I realized, “Huh. The ethos of communications is diametrically opposed to the ethos of software.” It kind of makes sense. If I was shooting satellites into the air and laying down millions of miles of wire everywhere, I would operate slowly and methodically, and that’s what I would do. That’s what the industry of communications industry has done for 100 years. The thing is, how you and I, how individuals, how companies, get value out of these networks has shifted. It’s no longer about the physical networks. It’s about the software that’s running that defines how we get value out of that network, what we can do, what’s possible. That’s all about software.
So we started Twilio in 2008 to solve the problem of bringing communications out of its legacy in hardware and physical networks and into its future, which is software. Now, we do that with a powerful set of APIs that run in the cloud that let any software developer be able to start building that future.
Tsahi: I’d say you succeeded in that.
Jeff: Oh, well, thank you. We feel like we’ve just started.
Tsahi: Okay. In all of these years, what would be one of the most surprising use cases that you can say that you’ve seen or come in front was like, “Whoa. That’s cool. That’s neat”?
Jeff: There’s so many. We build the platform. We never know what people are going to build. In fact, one of the little Easter eggs in Twilio’s history is that in every press release when we launch a new product, my quote ends with the words, “We can’t wait to see what you build.” Every press release, year after year after year, that was always the line. Nobody ever caught on.
There’s so many use cases. There’s the obvious ones. The whole on demand economy. Things like Uber and Lyft and Airbnb, where Twilio is not only notifying you that your car is arriving, but also connecting drivers and riders together. That whole idea that I would use the internet and my phone to get a stranger to pull a car up and get in the car, I was always told to not get in stranger’s cars. But now, that’s what we do every day, and use cases around how communications, and Twilio has made that safe, made that convenient, made that easy. I never would have thought of those the day we launched Twilio, because really, mobile phones, their current incarnation, smart phones, were just getting started, and that whole idea of it; the applications of it were still completely unknown.
But then there’s the crazy use cases that I still can’t imagine. One of my favorite crazy use cases is there’s some researchers in the United States who study the migratory habits of bears.
Tsahi: Okay.
Jeff: Right? It turns out that if you study the migratory habits of bears, you spend your days in a helicopter flying around looking for bears with binoculars. When you see a bear, you land your helicopter. You shoot the bear with a tranquilizer, then you climb up on the bear. You hope it’s tranquilized, and you put a collar on its neck that’s going to track its location. Then you run away very quickly, hopefully before the bear wakes up. Then a year later, you’re circling in your helicopter. You spot the bear again. You land. You shoot it with a tranquilizer again. You climb up on the bear again, hoping it’s actually tranquilized. You pull the data card out of the collar. You put a new one in, and you run away before the bear wakes up.
They’re like, “There’s got to be a better way. We would love to stop shooting bears with tranquilizers.” So they built a collar that had a 2G radio in it that collects all the data. When the bear wanders into an area with some cell service … They don’t exactly walk around in shopping malls. When it wanders in, it picks up coverage, and it texts all that data off the collar to a receptor they built on Twilio. That was, I thought, such a cool use case, because they’re using this technology, 2G radios. They’re low power. They’ve got maximum range, and it is texting the data off to build an app. You’re like, “Who would have thought of this?” We call this the internet of bears. I’m like, this is a use case I never would have imagined that there were people whose days were spent doing this. They found a use case for Twilio to solve this problem.
Here’s another crazy use case I love. There’s a researcher in the UK who built an app that allows you to call a phone number, and based on taking a recording of your voice, can detect with a very high degree of accuracy whether you’re likely to be predisposed to Parkinson’s disease.
Tsahi: I should use that one.
Jeff: You’ve done it?
Tsahi: No, but do you have the number?
Jeff: It’s a medical trial. They ran this trial. They found it to be an incredibly accurate way of assessing whether or not you are likely to develop Parkinson’s just by calling a phone number on Twilio and recording your voice for about 30 seconds. What’s amazing, as a researcher, he said trials like this would have usually cost millions of dollars to set up and run, because you would have needed all this sort of expertise and specialization. The doctor and his staff built it in a couple of weeks using Twilio for less than $1,000. They ran the whole trial, so it’s amazing.
Tsahi: Yes it is. I want to talk to you a little bit about the market itself and the different players in that market. The main ones that you would have thought that you would have lead or be part of that are the actual Telcos, the carriers, the ones that offer the phone service to the consumers. When you look at what they are doing in CPaaS and in APIs, they have services, but none of them are quite as successful as the other vendors out there. Why do you think that is?
Jeff: Well, I love the carriers. They have a very valuable product in that they are building out all the infrastructure that we all use every day to communicate in every way we can. I would say, though, that the carriers are not well situated to solve these software problems. Historically, carriers have not been software organizations. They’ve been very effective at ground operations, at getting infrastructure out in the field, repairing it, installing it. They’re very good at sales and marketing and servicing customers, but they historically have not been great software organizations, and that’s why I think a new type of company has been needed to come and solve this problem. A company that is a software company.
Twilio, half of our company is our software R&D group. That’s a different ethos. Building a world class software engineering organization, one that can ship and be agile and build resiliency with agility, which is what we call that process of having a high velocity of innovation but also achieving five nines of availability and things like that. That is a hard software problem, and so it takes a different kind of company to solve that.
Tsahi: Okay. What about all of the IaaS vendors? AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure? They offer infrastructure. They give you compute and storage and databases today, and it’s like shouldn’t they also do communications? It’s the next step. Why do you think that they aren’t there yet or aren’t there today?
Jeff: I think two things. First is, these companies have been primarily focused in the communications for online consumers. A lot of them have a consumer play, whether it’s Microsoft with Skype or Google with Hangouts and things like that. Then on the infrastructure side, I think they’ve gone to the things that they do particularly well on the infrastructure to build, which is to say it’s compute and storage, the most common areas of software computation, which has been a huge meaty market to go after, which has meant that communications hasn’t been the focus of theirs.
I think companies like Twilio, we focus on communications all day every day. That’s what we wake up to do, and so I think we’re uniquely situated to be able to build out great services that target exactly the use cases of communications while the other platforms have been really focused more on compute and storage and the key areas of general purpose computation.
Tsahi: Okay. Another trend that I’ve seen in the last year or so is around UCaaS, Unified Communication as a Service. These companies that offer you desk phones, the video conferencing systems, the things that you need in order to run and operate your enterprise internally. Communication between people inside the enterprise. It seems that all or most of these vendors today start offering APIs. They bundle APIs on top of their service. When you go and talk to them, they usually say, “We’ve got APIs just like Twilio. When you use us, you don’t need to pay for blah, blah, blah, whatever.” It’s like they compare themselves and position themselves as direct competitors to Twilio. Where do you see these two markets going? UCaaS and CPaaS. Where do they meet?
Jeff: Yeah. It’s a very different thing. If you think about Unified Communications as a Service, you’ve got an application. When you build an application, you make all sorts of assumptions about how the world works. You have a domain. You’ve got models. You’ve got all the core components of unified communications. Then when you add APIs to it, which by the way, it makes a ton of sense. Every SaaS product has APIs. In fact, UCaaS has been a little late to that game, I actually believe. Most SaaS companies have had APIs for 10 years. But when you add APIs to a software application, those APIs bring with it all the assumptions that you made about that application. That’s both good for some things … If you want to extend the application in a certain way and you want APIs to do it, that’s what those kinds of APIs are good for.
Twilio is designed from the ground up to be a set of APIs, to be ultimate flexibility. To not make all those assumptions about the one application that the end user is going to use it for, but rather to say these APIs are designed like building blocks to be put together in any way you see fit. That’s why we can address a wide variety of use cases, whether it’s two-factor authentication, identity verification, call centers, anonymous communications, notifications, alerts, anything you can imagine, you can build with Twilio. That’s because we were created from the ground up for this recombination of these building blocks as opposed to taking something that’s already built and fixed in place and then saying, “We’re going to add APIs to it.” It’s just a different way of approaching the API problem. Both of them have merits, but I like our approach, because it gives us the ultimate flexibility to really enter any of these use cases in a really wide breadth of things.
Tsahi: Do you see a unified communication platform as a service; A vendor that does such a service deciding not to build the whole communication infrastructure on its own, but instead using someone like Twilio, a communication platform as a service, to build on top what it is that he is doing?
Jeff: Yeah. I believe that companies whose primary business is communications can and definitely should and would get competitive advantage by using a platform like Twilio to build upon. The reason why is this. It used to be when those UC companies started, their core competency was making the phone ring. Then they’d add some software functionality on top of it, sure, but the vast majority of what they worried about was how do I make the phone ring? The problem is Twilio has democratized that ability.
Every developer … Every mobile developer, every web developer … now has the ability to make the phone ring in 100 countries around the world where we have phone numbers and touch every phone on the planet … Mobile, landline, et cetera … with an API that is reliable, that is scalable, that is global. Now, you’ve got developers out there who get to focus solely on customer experience, features, integration, UX, mobile. Build the things customers really care about and bring this core competency of focusing on user experience that software developers do so well. A one or two developer team can actually create a customer experience that is better than some large company that is focused purely on Unified Communications as a Service.
The existing UCaaS vendors, they would be wise to build on top of the same platform that any developer in the world can come and start to compete with them on. If they don’t, those independent software developers, they can actually start and build companies that are really compelling competitors, because they don’t have to focus on the low level bits. They’re focused on the things customers really care about, which is features, functionality, and the user experience that matters.
We have seen this play out, for example, in the call center market. We’ve seen … At our first conference back in 2011, Tiago was the founder of the company TalkDesk. One developer. Do you know Tiago?
Tsahi: Yes.
Jeff: Back in 2011, Tiago was the founder of TalkDesk. Single developer. He was a web developer. He knew web development really well and focused on building a product that he thought would be really compelling. Because of Twilio, he didn’t have to worry about any of the underlying infrastructure. Now, TalkDesk is hundreds of employees, has raised a lot of venture capital, has Fortune 1000 companies running call centers on them all because he was able to focus on the things customers really care about, is the features and functionality of the application. He did not have to worry about making the phone ring. That’s a really powerful competitive dynamic, as new players come in fundamentally uplevelled, because they’re building on platforms.
Tsahi: When I look at the feature set that you have at Twilio, the different types of functions that you offer, at the end of the day, that is something that is always commented when people talk about Twilio and they’re trying to attack Twilio as a company. They say, “All of the money comes at the end of the day from SMS and voice. That’s what they do, and at the end of the day, that’s too competitive as a market today.” If you actually look and search all of the CPaaS vendors, all of the direct competitors that you have, almost all of them have the same type of characteristics. They make most of their revenue today from SMS and voice and a lot less from the IP based services that they have, from the new things that come out. How do you as the leader in the CPaaS space deal with that and meet that challenge?
Jeff: I think there’s two things. First of all, most mature products for any company are generally going to be the largest contributors of revenue. Especially with developer products. We have a very long commitment to developers, and that takes a little longer than other products to adopt, because you launch a product, then developers have to see that product, understand it, and build their product, and then bring their product to market. You’ve got a little bit of an extra delay as a developer-focused company before products become commercially viable.
That is a long commitment, and that, quite frankly, is why a lot of companies don’t have the stomach to serve developers, because it’s a long commitment to developers to get those products to grow and be large. But we have that commitment. The way we look at developer products is that they have a slower start but then a fantastic ramp up capability. So I wouldn’t worry about the short term. We’re planning for the long term. In the long term, it is blatantly obvious that the software APIs and software communications are going to win. We’re there with all the products that developers need to build it. We see developers building amazing things using our software products, our video SDKs, Twilio Clients for Voice Over IP, the rest of our software products.
The other thing I’ll point out is that our software products often drive usage and adoption of our voice and SMS products as well. They don’t exist in a vacuum. When a customer builds a call center using Twilio’s TaskRouter product, which is a globally scalable cloud-based ACD … When you use TaskRouter to build a call center, guess what? It drives more voice revenue. When you use Twilio Client as the basis of your call center, it drives more PSTN revenue, generally, as well, because you’ve got an inbound phone number.
It’s interesting is that these new technologies, software-based communications, are actual drivers of competitive advantage for our customers who adopt them, whereas if you think about the customers of ours who’ve adopted Twilio Client to allow any computer with a web browser to be able to now become a call center by just plugging in a headset and using our Twilio Client product that’s powered by WebRTC, that has leveled the playing field because you no longer have to manufacture or sell hardware phones or PBXs in a closet. These new software technologies have been huge drivers of a new set of players to arise in this industry who previously wouldn’t have been able to do it. That’s creating a new market dynamic here of new players entering the field and new products entering the field that wouldn’t have existed 10 years ago.
That’s really exciting, and it’s creating a huge market shift, but it also draws more usage of the PSTN right along with it. The same thing you can say for our Twilio Chat product. The same thing you can say for a number of our products, Twilio Studio. So all of these products together, you usually don’t use them in a vacuum. You use them together with other products. That’s part of the nature of APIs. But having them all together and being able to plug them in together to do these interesting things is fundamentally changing the landscape of the companies and the products that are out there that are really pushing the ball forward on communications.
Tsahi: I think I saw the first thing that you said when I worked at RADVISION years ago, but in the opposite sense. At RADVISION, you had two business units. One of them was a technology business unit. We sold SDKs to others to build their own products. The second business unit dealt with selling videoconferencing equipment. Whenever there was a downturn in the company because of the market, the CEO came out and said, “We have this business unit that sells videoconferencing. It’s now slow because of the market. Then the TBU, the technology business unit, we’re still going strong because we see that this will go upstream three years from now when developers actually launch it.”
There, the business model was flipped. We usually licensed the software in advance so developers had to invest when they started, and not when they saw the revenue. What you are saying is that today, in order to be in the developer space, you don’t make the money up front from developers that build stuff in the future. You wait and you grow with them. That waiting for that growth is what makes a company big at the end, is being patient.
Jeff: Exactly right. It’s the combination of our usage-based revenue model that tightly aligns us with our customer’s success. This is key. When we think about what is the driver of innovation, what makes developers be successful in building their next idea, it is experimentation. Experimentation is the prerequisite to innovation. Everything that we do is about lowering the barriers to a developer getting started and running as many experiments as they can for an idea that they want to try out. That’s why we have such a low upfront. You get started … Every developer who has used Twilio started by spending their first penny to make that first phone call, send that first text message, fire up that first video session.
You never know which one of these ideas that developers are building is going to be the next great big idea. Our job is to make it so developers can try as many of these ideas and run as many experiments as they can until they find product market fit with the thing that they’re building. That’s why it’s a long commitment to developers, because you need to give them the runway. You need to have that patience, but you also need to have that attitude that it’s not about, “Hey, a developer came to our door. I’m here to get all the money from you today.” You’re like, “No. We’ll do well if you do well. I’m just here to make sure you do well. I’m here to do everything I can to make you successful in building your ideas.” Ultimately, that’s how I’m going to be successful, but it’s a long commitment.
We like to say, though, it is a compounding interest business, essentially. You invest in developers, and they build. With the usage-based model, as they grow, as they’re successful, that, then, turns into our success. For us, that means customer success is the very first thing. It’s the prerequisite to our own success. Everyone at Twilio is always focused on customer success first.
Tsahi: I’ve been to two Twilio SIGNAL events, both very interesting events. I really loved them. What I noticed that you know exactly what the product does. When there is a product launch, you play with it. You do it on stage. You use it. You’re a developer yourself. How can you do that and still be a CEO of more than 900 employees?
Jeff: I think as an API developer-first company, I have to do that. That’s how I can make sure that we’re building the right things, and that’s how I can make sure I’m close to our customers and I’m close to our products. I love playing around with the new Twilio products. I am the first person they give access to when we build stuff, or at least, I hope I am, because that’s how I love playing around. I just dive in there. I read the docs. I started building stuff. That’s really exciting.
Recently, I was building something for Halloween with my kids with some Arduinos. I love building internal things at Twilio. A few years ago, I built our goal-setting software that we were using at the time. I just dove in. They don’t let me touch production code anymore, which is probably a good thing, but I just love being a developer. Even though I’m a CEO, I love continuing to invest in that part of my life. Obviously, I don’t get to do it as much as I used to, but it would make me very sad if I had to stop. I’ve just arranged my schedule and arranged my life so that I always make sure I’ve got some time to stay current on new stuff, both inside Twilio and outside Twilio and build. I’ve always thought that just building, just having a project idea in mind and committing yourself to building it and picking even some new technologies you’ve never used before, that’s a great way to keep learning and keep building and keeping your skills up.
Tsahi: I can easily relate to that. Talking about products and what is it you do, the last year it seems that you have somewhat shifted. If up until now, you could have said that when Twilio launches a new product or introduces a new product, that would be yet another building block that you can use to do some kind of communication. A new communication service that you couldn’t build before. It seems that you’ve started moving upstream. There is the Engagement Cloud with Notify and Authy. Then there is even Twilio Studio that goes for me even one level above that. Why did you make that move? Why the shift?
Jeff: Well, we don’t see it as a shift, because to us, it’s always about having the right API for a developer to get the job done. As a platform, you start off with a set of building blocks that provide maximum flexibility, because you don’t necessarily know what developers are going to want to build. As you learn from developers what are the most common things that they want to get done, but also what was really hard? What did they think would be easy to build and it turned out was very hard?
We view our job as making our customers successful. When we see the things that we can do to make their lives easier, help them get the job done faster or not have to reinvent the wheel because they’re trying to figure out, “Hey, how do I figure out how to distribute calls?” and I see every other customer trying to figure that out, too, as they’re building a call center, it becomes obvious. You say, “Wow. My job is to make my customer’s life easier and make them more successful. Why don’t I build a product that does that thing?” So you end up with Twilio TaskRouter, for example.
In the case of Studio, we view it as making the developer’s job even easier and allowing more people to participate in the development and the maintenance of these applications they’re building. Why? Because we saw developers build an application, and certain parts of it are really exciting, like how do I figure out the exact experience I want? How do I integrate all this stuff? Then parts of it are really boring and become a tax to the developer and to the whole organization, such as when folks are saying, “Hey.” Product manager says, “Hey, can we update the text? We’re going to run an A/B test. Can you try 50% on this and 50% on that? Can you change the SMS text? Can you change how the call center greets the people coming in?”
The developers don’t see that as exciting. They see that as, “Oh, it’s continual maintenance. It keeps pulling story points off of me every week, because I’ve got to keep maintaining the thing.” We said, “Isn’t there a way that we can allow the developer to do the really important parts, the parts that are about integrating systems and things like that, and then take the other parts that are a little more standard and make it so not only the developer doesn’t have to write it … They can just drag and drop and build it easily … but they can also hand some of that off to other people in the organization.” Maybe the marketing people have ideas about how they want the content to work. Maybe the ops people want to change how the IVR call flow works. There’s all sorts of different people who are invested in these communications applications, because customer engagement touches so many parts of the company.
If we can offload a bunch of that work from the developer, that ultimately will accelerate our customer’s roadmap and make them more successful. Again, you go back. That’s our goal. By the way, when we make our customer successful, that makes us successful, so we’re all aligned in this. Studio is a great way to do that. So we keep listening to customers, hearing the things that they love about the API approach, the flexibility it gives them, the fact that they can now build things that they were never able to do in the past because pre-built software applications weren’t flexible enough. But then we say, “Great. How do I make it so that you can get that flexibility faster and easier than ever before?” You do that by listening to your customers and solving the most common pain points.
Tsahi: I really love Studio. I’ve played with it. It’s a great tool. Really.
Jeff: Awesome.
Tsahi: How do you make the definition of it? Going … Building a UI tool, an IDE that can mix and match stuff and do this logic is never easy. I’ve used tools before that are similar. Some of them are good. Most of them not the good. How did you nail that experience in a way that, at least for me, was just point on?
Jeff: I think there have been fits and starts in the history of computation around visual designing of programming. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don’t. To us, there were two things that were involved in that. Number one is working with a lot of customers and a lot of users. We actually started with paper and sticky notes and starting to design with them how they would want to design something like an IVR or an SMS bot or a chat bot, things like that. We actually did it with sticky notes before we wrote a single line of code. To us, that was the equivalent of for APIs, it’s writing the API docs first, putting them in front of a user and saying, “Hey, is this the API you would want?” We do that before we build the product. We did the same. We applied the same logic to building a user interface for drag and drop development.
Then the second thing was I think we constrained it down a bit to say, “This isn’t about general purpose computation,” because you get in all sorts of hairy things. We’re focused on the customer engagement. If we scope it down and we say, “We want to make the very best visual designer for Twilio for customer engagement. What are the things it should encompass?” I think that the key of building both power and simplicity is really understanding your domain that your customers are operating in and then designing the perfect thing for that domain.
I think that obviously, we’re just at the very beginning. We launched it just over a month ago, and so we’re continuing to learn from customers and get that feedback, but that’s our approach that I think has helped us to build something that customers find both powerful but also easy to adopt and easy to use. That comes from the same approach we’ve used to design APIs that I think customers would articulate in the same way. They’re powerful and easy to use.
Tsahi: What’s the feedback that you get about the engagement cloud? It’s out there for what, half a year now?
Jeff: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Look, when we talk to customers and we take a step back and we say, “What is Twilio all about? Why is Twilio important to you, ING Bank? Why is Twilio important to you, Morgan Stanley bank?” Some of these very large organizations, so obviously have a lot of options and a lot of legacy systems they could have kept using. The answer we get is, first of all, flexibility. With Twilio, we get this unprecedented flexibility.
When you think about the importance of customer engagement to a company, almost nothing is more important. When I talk to a CEO of a bank, and you ask them, “What’s important?” they are so concerned about, “How can I maintain my relationship with my customer?” That’s the biggest fear that C-level executives have. That is done with customer engagement. How do you keep up? If you think about the problem space here, it’s insane.
As consumers, the technology that we use has advanced incredibly rapidly in the last five to 10 years. We’ve got a wide variety of new applications that we use. We use video. I use video almost daily. I would have thought that was crazy 10 years ago. I would have thought that was stupid, and now here we are. We use video on a daily basis. We’ve got great chat applications. We’ve got apps in our chat and chat in our apps. It’s amazing. Yet, for companies to communicate to their customers, it is incredibly broken. Why? Because companies can’t keep up with the pace at which our expectations are changing for how communications is going to work and how great of an experience it’s going to be.
We’re still stuck in the days where you essentially call an IVR of a company and they don’t know who you are. You enter your 40-digit account number and then you talk to an agent. They’re still asking your name five times. You’re like, if I had that experience with a friend, if I called my friend and they asked me my name five times during the call, I would think there was something medically wrong with them. Yet when you call a company, that’s the experience you expect. Nothing is more broken about communications than how companies talk to their customers. We want to fix that.
When you talk to executives at companies and you say, “What keeps you up at night?” It’s, “Yeah. I’m worried about losing my connection to my customer. Being disintermediated by all these other technologies that are coming out. I need to keep the connection in order to stay top of mind and stay relevant to my customer.” When I think about how that works, it’s like, “Well, you’ve got rapidly proliferating ways in which you need to reach your customer.”
10, 15 years ago, talking to your customer generally meant you had a phone number and customers could call it. Now, you’ve got not just phone calls. You’ve got text messaging, you’ve got chat, you’ve got mobile apps with push notifications. You’ve got WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger. You’ve got so many different … Now Alexa, Google Home, personal assistants. You have so many ways and very finite development resources to keep up with this changing world. By the way, it’s not just the ways in which you need to communicate that is proliferating. Think about all the departments in a company that need to actually keep up. You’ve got sales, marketing, customer support, onboarding, product teams. Every part of the company is trying to keep up with every part of this changing technology landscape. It is an unsolvable problem for most companies.
That’s what the engagement cloud is here to sell. We want to provide one system that allows companies to keep building, keep iterating, but to reduce the barriers, reduce the time to do that and give one tool to all these different teams who need to touch customers, to be able to keep up with this rapidly changing landscape and constantly iterating on those customer experiences with easy to use tools and infrastructure that they don’t have to worry about scaling. They don’t have to worry about reliability. They don’t have to worry about onboarding new platforms. We’re going to do that for them as the world is changing. They get all that stuff from us, and so they focus on, “Okay, what’s my special sauce? What’s the thing that makes my brand and my company engaging to my customer?” I’m going to focus on that last bit, and we’re going to iterate on that constantly, and I’m going to empower all these different teams inside the company to be able to have that at their fingertips. That’s what the engagement cloud vision is all about.
Tsahi: Thank you for your time, Jeff.
Jeff: Thank you, Tsahi.
Tsahi: I thoroughly enjoyed it.
The post Jeff Lawson on the Past, Present and Future of Programmable Communications appeared first on BlogGeek.me.
DID Routing Solution With Kamailio
- Inbound Termination with Carrier IP validation
- Carrier LCR for DID/TFN to PSTN forwarding
- Inbound Abuse Block
- CDR in MongoDB
- IPTables Block for SIP Scanners
- Integration with RTPEngine
- RedisDB for quick DB Access
Vidyo and RTC in 2018
Vidyo has made several announcements in the past couple of weeks. Time to see why the time is right for RTC across markets.
It has been a busy month for Vidyo. It has made two interesting announcements:
- The introduction of VP9 into its products
- Streamlining its product line
Vidyo has been known for their video routing technologies for many years. Well before WebRTC came into the ring. It is great to see how they have come in merging the two, along with how they are trying to fit their business model to the realities of WebRTC.
Vidyo, WebRTC, VP9 and SVCHow do you compete in a world where WebRTC is becoming the dominant media engine? Especially when the baseline implementation is dictated by what you get by default in the browser?
Vidyo has always had its own proprietary codec implementations. Ones that are optimized for SVC – Scalable Video Coding. Alex Eleftheriadis guest posted here last year with an explanation of SVC. To simplify, SVC gives two big advantages:
- Better error resiliency on poor network conditions
- Better support for multiparty and broadcast interactions
In many cases, you can get these things done without SVC and the end result would be good enough. But there are times when this extra kick to quality and optimization of how the network gets used makes all the difference.
When it comes to current browser implementations of WebRTC, the only video codec that has any kind of SVC support is VP9 and that takes place in Chrome. To take advantage of SVC, there are only two routes a company can take:
- Rely on the browser implementation and exposure of VP9/SVC features, and then implement these capabilities in its application
- Build its own XXX/SVC implementation into a non-browser application
Option (1) is great, but it assumes that:
- Browsers prioritize VP9/SVC over other features. The challenge here is that things like aligning with the upcoming WebRTC 1.0 spec is most likely a lot more important
- VP9/SVC will be implemented soon, and controlling its SVC capabilities will be exposed to the developers via JS APIs or additional SDP parameters
- The existence of media servers that support SVC and optimize and fine-tune well for it
Reality is that on Chrome, the VP9 implementation in WebRTC supports SVC on the decoder side, but it doesn’t yet supports WebRTC in the encoder side.
Vidyo took the middle ground here, trying to enjoy both worlds: It always had its own SVC implementation in H.264 but allowed using WebRTC. Now, with its VP9/SVC implementation, it gets the freedom to improve video quality of its sessions in ways that others can’t.
If you use Vidyo.io today (and its other products in the near future), then Vidyo will try and prioritize the use of VP9 over other video codecs. And if some of the users in the session are making use of Vidyo’s SDKs instead of the native browser WebRTC implementation (i.e – joining from mobile or a desktop app), they will encode VP9 with SVC capabilities, and Chrome will be able to decode the bitsream – though the browser’s own encoded bitstream won’t be using SVC (at least not for now).
This places Vidyo ahead of the pack in SVC support that plays well with WebRTC.
Vidyo’s Product LineHere’s the gist of the new product live view from Vidyo:
Vidyo has taken the approach of offering a single technical infrastructure to host and run all of its products. This is the right move forward and an embrace of the cloud. In a way, Vidyo is continuing its shift from on premise deployments towards a Vidyo hosted and managed cloud platform.
Vidyo.io can be defined as CPaaS, a Communication Platform as a Service; while its VidyoCloud can be defined as UCaaS, a Unified Communication Platform as a Service.
Vidyo started life in the UC business, moving to the cloud and then adding an API platform. In many other cases, UC / UCaaS vendors take the approach of adding an API on top of their UCaaS product and then just calling it CPaaS. Vidyo decided on “separating” the two which feels to me as the better approach. It casts a wider net over the potential target market and the types of use cases that Vidyo can now cater for.
To this product line, Vidyo has added earlier this year VidyoEngage, its answer to video based contact centers.
The end result? Vidyo can now be used in the 3 biggest domains for visual communications:
- Unified Communications, with its VideoCloud offering; providing a complete video communications platform
- Contact Centers, with VidyoEngage; providing a higher level abstraction of the call center modal to its customers
- All the rest, through its Vidyo.io platform for developers
You can use Vidyo.io to build a UC or a CC application if that’s your need, or you can just pick up VidyoCloud or VidyoEngage to get there.
What’s Next?The challenge for Vidyo will be in competing in 3 different fronts at the same time, and the threat of losing focus. I am guessing this is one of the reasons for this streamlining – it is meant to simplify its internal infrastructure that is used in these 3 products on the technical level.
Managing these separate businesses and keeping abreast in all 3 markets will be hard, but Vidyo is off to a good start here.
When it comes to Vidyo.io, the addition of VP9/SVC support positions Vidyo as the technology leader in its space with the ability to offer the best media quality. Its competitors will require
The post Vidyo and RTC in 2018 appeared first on BlogGeek.me.
Kamailio Git Branch 5.1 Created
cd kamailio
git checkout -b 5.1 origin/5.1Hopefully in two-three weeks time frame the full release of Kamailio v5.1.0 will be out.From now on, any corresponding fix has to be pushed first to master branch and then cherry-picked to branch 5.1. No new features can get in branch 5.1. Enhancements to documentation or helping tools, as well as kemi exports are still allowed. If you are not sure about doing or not a backport, ask on sr-dev mailing list.The master branch can now get new features, which will be part of the future 5.2.x release series.Thanks for flying Kamailio!
ClueCon Weekly With Fred Posner
What’s New With the Jitsi Videobridge?
Jitsi is getting a boost in its development.
When a developers focused company gets acquired it is time to start worrying.
Was the acquisition due to the technology, the customers or the business model?
Will the product continue to grow and flourish in the new regime?
Are the current signed agreements going to be renewed?
For open source, there are even more questions.
How will the community that was created around the open source project be treated?
Will existing business models around support, customization and dual licensing be maintained or will they be killed?
Two and a half years ago or so we had 3 popular open source media servers for WebRTC: Janus, Jitsi and Kurento.
Kurento got acquired by Twilio and Jitsi got acquired by Atlassian. Janus is still independent.
The progress made around Kurento since its acquisition was minimal at best. My guess is that Twilio is just too busy in getting its own multiparty video ready for GA to focus on the Kurento open source project itself. It also haven’t quite acquired everything that is Kurento – parts of it were left for the community and the original parent company Naevatec. The time passed is making a lot of the Kurento adopters frustrated and in search of different alternatives.
Best time to join my WebRTC Course? Today. Office hours are starting next week, and there’s a great bonus ebook of how meet.jit.si built its scalable infrastructure.So time to ask –
How did Jitsi fair since its acquisition?
Surprisingly well.
And it seems to be getting a lot more interesting lately.
In the past 4 months, I’ve been adding almost on a weekly basis a post about Jitsi into the WebRTC Weekly. The team there has been continuously churning out new features into the project.
Here’s what was announced on the Jitsi blog since June when it comes to new features:
June
- New Layouts in Jitsi Meet
- Control the Volume for Every Meet Participant
- Speaker Times in Jitsi Meet
- Adaptivity
- Telephony Support on meet.jit.si
July
August
September
October
There’s a mix of announcements here. They range from addition of UX feature to some deep optimizations of the media server itself. And part of it is due to GSoC, Google Summer of Code, a project started by Google some years ago where university students can join open source projects as interns. Jitsi has been part of this project for some time now.
UX ImprovementsIn a way, these are the least interesting features when it comes to a media server, but the ones that makes it easier to use.
What Jitsi did in this round was tweak the UI to be a bit more modern and easier to use. For video layouts, there was a decision to better cater for 1:1 scenarios and to move video thumbnails from the bottom of the page to the right side of the page. This is also what Google decided to do once they shifted away from Hangouts to Meet. This makes for a more modern approach that sits well with the wider displays we have in recent years.
An audio only button was added to the UI. I am assuming it is just a shortcut to muting incoming and outgoing video. Having this UI element there makes it easier for users to operate (and easier for adopters of the Jitsi Videobridge to customize).
The interesting addition to me is the speaker times one.
I am intrigued in this case to know how easy would it be for an application to get that information from the Jitsi Videobridge – is this supported via the signaling offered by Jitsi towards the web client or is it also available as a backend-to-backend REST API? I can see this being used later in various ways, assuming the API is detailed enough and easy to use.
IntegrationsA WebRTC media server is but a part of what you need to run a full application. While central and important, there are other aspects to it. In recent months, Jitsi have added a few additional integrations, making it easier to use and connect to.
Three such integration points were announced:
1. Mobile SDKJitsi had mobile applications for quite some time. While nice, it is different than having a mobile SDK.
Something I’ve been telling media server vendors for a few years now, is that they should offer a mobile SDK as part of their media server. In WebRTC, it is an important part of their offering and one that is hard to ignore.
In the case of Jitsi, users had to use the mobile application as a reference and modify it to their heart’s content. The problem with this approach starts when you need to maintain the codebase in the long run. When a new version of the mobile app comes out – how do you know which parts are critical to upgrade (=without them the app will break with the new Jitsi Videoserver) and which ones are just UI fixes that you can ignore or just pass since you’ve created your own UI experience already?
This is exactly why an SDK is such an important aspect of the solution:
With a mobile SDK, application developers can now just use the Jitsi Meet mobile application as a reference or even write something from scratch on top of the mobile SDK itself. Each is independently updated and maintained, making it easier to upgrade to newer releases.
2. Speech to textTranslation and NLP seems all the rage these days.
The way you get these things connected to WebRTC varies, but follows a similar approach for media servers:
You somehow collect the audio streams on the media server, mix and process them to the format supported by a 3rd party speech-to-text engine (Google Cloud speech-to-text seems quite popular these days), and once you get the resulting text, you do something with it.
In the case of Jitsi, this was a GSoC project. Information about its current status can be found on the developer’s website – Nik Vaessen.
This probably requires some more improvements and polish, but offers a good starting point for developers.
I’d wager that in GSoC 2018, the Jitsi team is planning on adding translation and text-to-speech to it.
3. TelephonyTelephony was already available in Jitsi before. It is implemented via a Jigasi server (JItsi GAteway to SIP). Now Atlassian is eating its own dogfood and not only with its internal HipChat service but in its free meet.jit.si showcase service.
In the case of meet.jit.si, the length of calls was limited to 2 minutes, enabling hunting down meeting participants who haven’t joined the session.
This serves two purposes:
- Show that Jigasi works and showcase its use
- Work out the kinks of getting this into the UX
At the heart of Jitsi is the media server itself. This is what developers aim for to begin with and the additions there are quite interesting.
The first one is that Jitsi now supports peer to peer media traversal for 1:1 sessions – in effect – no media server. The reasoning being that many of the calls end up being 1:1 and it is far easier and cost effective to share media directly between the participants.
In the past, supporting such a thing with Jitsi required running a separate signaling mechanism for 1:1 sessions and then once the need arise to grow, shift and renegotiate everything in front of Jitsi. It was tedious at best.
The other work effort is way more interesting.
Bandwidth estimation is nasty. Network conditions are varying and dynamic. You can start a session with 2Mbps and have it considerably drop throughout the session, coming back up again and changing characteristics.
To get that right, WebRTC (and any other VoIP alternative) needs to use bandwidth estimation. This is a process where the device tries to understand how much bandwidth is available to him at any given point in time. The algorithm can be naive, smart, complex, whatever. And a lot of the perceived quality of a call would rely on the quality of the algorithm used for bandwidth estimation.
WebRTC has its own built in bandwidth estimation mechanism. It works. But you need your own algorithm in a media server. Jitsi has its algorithm, and it is work in progress.
The Jitsi team are now taking it to the next level, trying to not only understand availability of bandwidth but also what the best course of action should be – it is trying to discern if it is better to reduce bitrate or add forward error correction instead.
It also does that with the coolest set of tech tools available to us today – Tensor Flow and Machine Learning.
Here’s what Emil Ivov shared during our Kranky Geek event last month:
Where to Next?Looking for an open source alternative for your media server?
The most popular approaches out there for you are Janus and Jitsi.
Which one to pick out of the two seems to be based on personal taste more than anything else.
Best time to join my WebRTC Course? Today. Office hours are starting next week, and there’s a great bonus ebook of how meet.jit.si built its scalable infrastructure.
The post What’s New With the Jitsi Videobridge? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.
OSS IRIS Broadcast Project Launched
Pages
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Wow, this most certainly is a great a theme.
Company name
Yet more available pages
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Typography
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