Comments on: Vidyo Bringing SVC to WebRTC, But at What Cost?

By: Brent Kelly

Brent Kelly — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 22:48:56 +0000

There is no money in desktop or browser video; however, there is a lot of money in video infrastructure. With VP9-SVC, every website that enables multipoint video as part of WebRTC may need a video media router (alias VidyoRouter!!!). They can build their own, or they can license Vidyo’s video media router. And by the way, Vidyo has 38 patents on this kind of technology, so good luck with trying to build your own without stepping on one of Vidyo’s patents. Thus, Vidyo, effectively, becomes like Twilio or Toxbox or others promoting infrastructure that will work with all of these WebRTC-enabled browsers. A nice move by Vidyo!

By: Dave Michels

Dave Michels — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 04:01:33 +0000

Vidyo took it because they had to? This is about as good as it gets.

While Polycom and LifeSize are warning people not to be too excited about WebRTC compared to their solutions – Vidyo just made every Chrome desktop a high quality vidyo endpoint.

The stuff they are giving away is not important to their business (they sell cheap endpoints based on Intel NUCs), but has huge ramifications for their server infrastructure. They have also locked in their own technology to the next generation of video (WebRTC and VP9).

By: Warren Mc

Warren Mc — Sat, 31 Aug 2013 23:32:35 +0000

One of the things holding Vidyo back from large public deployments is the client licensing. It may not seem much but that $5 per installation is a brick around the neck of resellers trying to get Vidyo into more open projects. This seems to be a path to a web based free Vidyo client, that would have the capability to leverage investment in Vidyo ports. This would open possibilities where higher capability is required for a large population of users with relatively short term port usage.

Another opportunity would be to leverage the WebRTC peer to peer mode for small conferences, freeing infrastructure ports for larger conf or transcoding load.

By: Lawrence Byrd

Lawrence Byrd — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 15:31:41 +0000

Personally I see this as an incredibly smart move by Vidyo. Whenever any kind of disruptive wave sweeps through an industry the smart vendors have to decide how to ride that wave and decide what becomes free (something will) and where their remaining points of value are. Google is a huge force fighting a broad and bloody cloud hegemony war with Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, maybe Amazon, probably nuevo-Yahoo and others. Google, for their own reasons, wants to completely commoditize video/audio/p2p-data real-time infrastructure on the client side. Why fight that? And why try and keep pushing H.264/H.265 against Google’s push for free licensing-unencumbered VP9 as a web standard? Google has spent ~$200M so far and appears committed to spending/building/buying whatever it needs to succeed at this. Vidyo is saying that they think VP9 and WebRTC is going to win substantial share and that they want to be a part of that win. They clearly plan to establish their value on the server side with app functionality, enterprise capabilities and security, and, yes, VP9 and H.265 interoperability to bridge the legacy/new-web divide, where Vidyo will be able to bring unique skills. Plenty of money to be made if you stay on top of the wave. Smart.

By: galeal

galeal — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 13:59:14 +0000

Seems mainly to be Vidyo PR to counteract the negative attention of the announcement that Google is taking Vidyo out of Hangouts (and a favor from Google to support the PR, earned by Vidyo being a good Hangout partner).

There is no guarantee that standards decisions will end up in Vidyo’s favor, regardless of what they contribute.

All that said, you make a great point on the signaling demands of SVC…something that WebRTC has tried to stay away from…so will make for some very interesting discussion (which imo would have happened regardless of this PR as there are SVC (and CLUE for that matter) advocates within the WebRTC communities.

By: Alan McCrindle

Alan McCrindle — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 09:37:32 +0000

I am guessing that Vidyo and Google have already got something working with VP8 if the info about Google+ offering HD vidyo by swapping out from svc to VP8 is correct

http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/28/google-hangouts-go-hd-starting-with-hangouts-on-air/