I’ve been dealing with VoIP ever since I finished my first degree in computer science. That was… a very long time ago.

WebRTC? Been at it since the start. I co-founded testRTC, dealing with testing and monitoring WebRTC applications. Did consulting. Wrote a lot about it.

For the last two years I’ve been meaning to write a short ebook explaining video quality metrics in WebRTC. And I finally did that 😎

The challenges of measuring video quality

Ever since we started testRTC, customers came to us asking for a quality score to fit their video application. But where do you even begin?

• A 1:1 call quality will be perceived differently at 1mbps running on a smartphone or a PC with a 27” display
• These same 2 participants collaborating together on a document require much less bitrate and resolution
• Group video calls with 15 people or more requires a totally different perspective as to what can be seen as good video quality
• Cloud gaming with a unidirectional video stream at really low latency has different quality requirements
• A webinar is different than the scenarios above

Deciding what’s good or bad is a personal decision that needs to be made by each and every company for its applications. Sometimes, differently per scenario used.

Where do we even start then?

Packet loss and latency aren’t enough

If I had to choose two main characteristics of media quality in real time communications, these were going to be packet loss and latency.

Packet loss tells you how bad the network conditions are (at least most of the time this is what it is meant to do). Your goal would be to reduce packet loss as much as possible (don’t expect to fully eradicate it).

Latency indicates how far the users are from your infrastructure or from each other. Shrinking this improves quality.

But that’s not enough. There’s more to it than these two metrics to be able to get a better picture of your application’s media quality – especially when dealing with video streams.

Know your top 7 video quality metrics in WebRTC

Which is why I invite you to download and review the top 7 video quality metrics in WebRTC – my new ebook which lists the most important KPIs when it comes to understanding video quality in WebRTC. There you will find an explanation of these metrics, along with my suggestions on what to do about them in order to improve your application’s video quality.

And yes – the ebook is free to download and read – once you jot down your name and email, it will be sent to you directly.

The post Video quality metrics you should track in WebRTC applications appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

I am a sucker for science fiction books. About 15 years ago, when I had a blog on RADVISION’s website, I even wrote a post about how writers envisioned video conferencing in science fiction books. Alas, that post has died, along with the RADVISION blogs, years ago.

Last week I sat down in the car with my daughter, ending up talking about books. It dawned on me that there are several that have stuck with me throughout the years and resonated. Books that keep me thinking even today.

This time, I decided to share them here. Unrelated to WebRTC, video, CPaaS or communication technologies. Just something I wanted to share 🤷‍♂️

And yes. All links are affiliated – my Kindle needs a few new good science fiction books 😉

They’re brought here in no specific order (alphabetically…)

Blood Music / Greg Bear

Greg Bear has many great books. Blood Music is definitely one of them (I had to decide if I suggest this one on Drawin’s Radio – ending up with this one).

What I like about this one is how it combines miniaturization with biology. I know nothing about biology and what I do know about technology and miniaturization is by using computers.

This was a compelling read and a really interesting one of what happens at the extreme ends of connecting the dots between these two things.

It also resonated with my own philosophical thoughts about the difference in depiction and scale between the makings of atoms to the whole universe. To understand this specific sentence, reading Blood Music by Greg Bear is likely needed.

Daemon / Daniel Suarez

LLMs, chatbots, AI. This book has it all.

One of my previous managers suggested I read that, and he was spot on. It takes the angle of how the gaming industry and its NPCs (Non Player Characters) can make a difference if they are “let loose” in the world.

It takes the technologies we have today (or rather a few years ago) and tries to prophesize where we will be with them. Definitely a few misses in where we are headed, but a lot to think about.

Especially when the time to decide who works for who – the machine for us or us for the machine.

Go read Daemon by Daniel Suarez

Ender’s Game / Orson Scott Card

This is the second or third science fiction book I read in English and it got me onto the path of reading in English a lot. A roommate at the university gave it to me to read and said “it is about a small kid that saves the world”.

Besides the science fiction part of the book, how it covers bullying and the way to win in wars is interesting. I like how Orson outlines the story.

A few years after reading it, Orson Scott Card came to Israel for an event. I went there with a colleague from work for the book signing event, standing two hours in line for one minute with Orson. He gave me his full attention and was surprised at the book I brought to sign (Enchantment – it isn’t in this list since it is fantasy and not science fiction).

Anyway, Orson Scot Card is always a good read and Enter’s Game is a great starting point.

Expendable / James Alan Gardner

This is one enjoyable read. It took me into this riveting series of books by James Alan Gardner.

To put it short, explorers are expendable. They are dropped into new worlds to explore, and the reason they were selected is because they are deformed in one way or another but smart. So instead of fixing their external deformity (or ugliness), they are used as explorers. Why? Because if they looked good – they wouldn’t be expendable. Their death might matter to someone.

The rest of the series revolves around nanotech and AI. Or magic. Or something in between.

This is a lot less about ruminating about the books afterwards and more about enjoying the read – go read Expendable by James Alan Gardner.

Old Man’s War / John Sclazi

John Sclazi is another master storyteller (at least for me). Old Man’s War marks the beginning of a great series of many books (and not the only ones I love from John Sclazi).

Old Man’s War places humanity in a universe full of alien life – most of it warring in nature (or at least that’s the initial premise of it all). The way to build an army, the solution is to take the elderly and have them undergo a physical change, essentially taking them a bit apart from the rest of humanity and turning them into soldiers.

Since Earth is kept a wee bit back in its technology, they’ve seen most of what there is in life already and are old. So getting a younger body is all that is needed to recruit them for the cause.

The more I get older (age 40 was especially rough – it is when I started breaking in the seams or so it seems), the more I think about this series of books – and how I wish (or don’t wish) to be young again.

This series, as well as many of his other books are a joy to read – Old Man’s War by John Sclazi

Ready player one / Ernest Cline

Skip the movie. Read the book.

This has the word metaverse all over it. If you read Snow Crash by Neal Sephenson then you’ll want to read this one. And if you haven’t then just go read them both 🤷‍♂️

Besides the part of metaverse, large corp and all that stuff we’re here to ponder, what really sets this book apart is the treasure trove that it is for nostalgy. If you are 40 years or older, know what a Commodore 64 is, played Pac Man on a handheld device before there was such a thing as a PC, then you’ll find your youth inside this book. For me, this was a true joy to read.

Oh, and I just started reading Ready Player Two (noticed that when I went searching for the books I loved for this article).

Go read Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

The Peace War / Vernor Vinge

If you know Vernor Vinge as a scifi writer then you don’t need me for this one. If you read scifi and haven’t read a Vernor Vinge book then you should. In such a case, The Peace War is a great place to start.

This one is about technology and fighting wars with the resources you have. Where one side rules all the other goes and miniaturizes stuff.

This, as well as many of his other books just float in my head and come out from time to time (especially books like A Fire Upon The Deep or Rainbows End, both from the point of view of communication technologies and artificial intelligence).

Anyways, just go read The Peace War by Vernor Vinge. Or any other book by Vernor Vinge for that matter…

The Speed of Dark / Elizabeth Moon

This book touched me in many ways. It isn’t exactly science fiction – it is mostly the effect improvements in healthcare on moral decisions we need to take.

In this case, it is about the last autistic people in the world, after autism is all but eradicated, and what it means for an autistic adult to decide to “heal”. Would that be a good thing for him? A bad one? Will he stay the same person?

And all of that written from the point of view of the autistic person.

I truly loved this one and walked around with the baggage it left in me afterwards. Highly recommended – The Speed of Dark / Elizabeth Moon.

Winter World / A.G. Riddle

I read this one last winter… and it got me into the mood of winter and kept me there. All dark and cold. This book (and the series) is so well written. You can just feel the cold and the darkness as you read it.

The story is about our earth, dealing with climate change – one where the sun just gets blotted out of the sky until it is no more visible. At least that’s the first book. It is about choices – technological and human ones. And about our will to survive.

I’ll just leave it at that and say that this winter here is cold as well. And it got me thinking about this book series again.

Go read Winter World by A.G Riddle.

Wool / Hugh Howey

No. I haven’t seen it on Apple TV. I read the book and then all 3 books in this series. And then the rest of the Silo stories available. It is that riveting.

This is less about technology (at least the first book) and more about the human condition and how technology affects it. Like many of the other books in this article that I am recommending, this series is also dystopian in nature. It isn’t that I like my books bleak – it is just that the bleak ones stick with me longer and cause me to think about my day to day a lot more.

Anyways, go read Wool by Hugh Howey.

Your turn

Got any books you think I should be reading? Science fiction and fantasy would be great:

• For fantasy more single book experiences (think Enchantment by Orson Scott Card or Neverwhere  by Neil Gaiman)
• For Science fiction I am quite comfortable with series of books

Now I need to get back to Ready Player Two 😉

I’ll be back to the usual communication technology articles next time.

The post Science fiction books that resonated with me appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Along with Philipp Hancke, I’ve been running multiple projects. WebRTC Insights is one of the main ones.

Three years ago, we decided to start a service – WebRTC Insights – where we send out an email every two weeks about everything and anything that WebRTC developers need to be aware of. This includes bug reports, upcoming features, Chrome experiments, security issues and market trends.

All of this with the intent of empowering you and letting you focus on what is really important – your application. We take care of giving you the information you need quicker and in a form that is already processed.

Three years into this initiative, this is still going strong. We’ve onboarded a new client recently, and this is what he had to share with us on the first week already:

“[The Insights] Newsletter has been great and very helpful. Wish we had subscribed 2 years ago.”

Sean MacIsaac, Founder and EVP, Engineering @ Roam

😊

Why is the WebRTC Insights so useful for our clients?

It boils down to two main things:

1. Time
2. Focus

We reduce the time it takes for engineers and product people to figure out issues they face and trends on the market. Instead of them searching the internet to sift through hints or trying to catch threads of information on things they care about, we give it straight to them – usually a few days before their clients (or management) complains about it.

On top of it, we increase their focus on what’s important to them. Going back to past issues to find problems, search issues, look at security problems, know of experiments Google is doing or just be aware of the areas where Google is investing their efforts – all of these become really simple to do.

In the past few weeks we’ve been getting complaints from clients about audio issues on Mac (usually acoustic echo problems in Chrome). These were already hinted to in one of our previous issues and the full details appeared in the more recent issues. In parallel, we’ve been able to sniff around for root causes for them almost in real-time – enabling them to zero in on the problem and find a suitable workaround.

If I weren’t so modest, I would say that for those who are serious about WebRTC, we are a force multiplier in their WebRTC expertise.

WebRTC Insights by the numbers

Since this is the third year, you can also check out our past “year in review” posts:

• A year of WebRTC Insights
• Two years of WebRTC Insights

This is what we’ve done in these 3 years:

26 Insights issued this year with 329 issues & bugs, 136 PSAs, 15 security vulnerabilities, 230 market insights all totaling 231 pages. That’s quite a few useful insights to digest and act upon.

We have covered over a thousand issues and written more than 650 pages.

👉 WebRTC is still ever changing – both in the codebase and how it gets used by the market.

Activity on libWebRTC has cooled down yet again in the last year, dropping below 200 commits a month consistently:

This is more visible by looking at the last four years:

On one hand WebRTC is very mature now, on the other hand it seems to us that there is still a lot of work to be done and bugs to be fixed. External contributions were up. What is concerning is that the “big drop” in May happened three months after Google announced a round of layoffs but we have not seen many departures of long-time contributors.

Let’s dive into the categories, along with a few new initiatives we’ve taken this year as part of our WebRTC Insights service.

Bugs

The number of reported external bugs has dropped considerably as did the number of issues tracking new work and initiatives. This correlates with the decreased commit activity.

The areas for bugs also shifted, we have seen a lot more issues related to hardware acceleration (since Google is eying that now to further reduce the CPU usage in Google Meet). Operating systems are starting to become a bigger issue, for example MacOS Sonoma caused quite a few audio issues and enabled overlaid emoji reactions (a bad choice with consequences described here) by default as part of a bigger push to move features like background blur to the OS layer. And of course, every autumn brings a new Safari on iOS release which means a ton of regressions…

A good example of how Philipp himself uses Insights as a way to identify what change caused a regression was the lack of H.264 fallback on Android which rolled out in Chrome 115 in August. We had been commenting on the original change end of May:

That said, we did not think of Android which remains complicated when it comes to H.264 support. Thankfully this rollout was guarded by a feature flag so the regression could be mitigated by the WebRTC team in less than two days.

PSAs & resources worth reading

In addition to the public service announcements done by Googlers (and Philipp) as part of making changes to the C++ API or network behavior we continue to be tracking Chromium-related “Intents” (which are a useful indicator for what is going to ship) and relevant W3C/IETF discussions in this section. We also moved more in-depth technical comments on relevant blog posts from the “Market” section which made the overall decline in activity less visible here.

Experiments in WebRTC

Chrome’s field trials for WebRTC are a good indicator of what large changes are rolling out which either carry some risk of subtle breaks or need A/B experimentation. Sometimes, those trials may explain behavior that only reproduces on some machines but not on others. We track the information from the chrome://version page over time which gives us a pretty good picture on what is going on:

We have gotten a bit better and now track rollout percentages. We have not seen regressions from these rollouts in the last year which is good news.

WebRTC security alerts

This year we continued keeping track of WebRTC related CVEs in Chrome (15 new ones in the past year). For each one, we determine whether they only affect Chromium or when they affect native WebRTC and need to be cherry-picked to your own fork of libwebrtc when you use it that way.

In recent months we’ve seen a trend of looking more closely at the codec implementations to find security threats there. Our expectation is that this will continue in the coming year as well – expect more CVEs around this area.

A personal highlight was Google’s Natalie Silvanovich following up on a silly SDP munging thing Philipp did with CVE-2023-4076 which affected WebRTC munging in Chrome (but not native applications:

If only anyone had told us that using SDP in the API, let alone having Javascript manipulate it in the input, is a bad idea…

WebRTC market guidance

What are the leaders in video conferencing doing? What is Google doing with Meet, which directly affects WebRTC’s implementation? Are they all headed in the same direction? Do they invest in different technologies and domains?

How about CPaaS vendors? How are they trying to differentiate from each other?

Other vendors who use WebRTC or delve into the communication space – where do they innovate?

Here’s a quick example we’ve noticed when Twilio worked on migrating their media servers to different IP and ports:

This ability to look at best practices of vendors, how they handled such challenges, or introduced new features is an eye opener. These are the things we cover in our market guidance. The intent here is to get you out of your echochamber that is your own company, and see the bigger world. We do that in small doses, so that it won’t defocus you. But we do it so you can take into account these trends and changes that are shaping our industry.

The interesting thing is that as WebRTC goes more and more into a kind of a “maintenance mode” with its browser releases, the variance and interesting newsworthy items we see on the market as a whole is growing. This is likely why our market insights section has seen rapid growth this year.

Insights automation

We’ve grown nicely in our client base, and up until recently, we sent the emails… manually.

It became a time consuming activity to say the least, and one that was also prone to errors. So we finally automated it.

The WebRTC Issue emails are now automated. They include the specific issue along with the latest collection security issues. It has made life considerably simpler on our end.

Join the WebRTC experts

We are now headed into our fourth year of WebRTC Insights.

Our number of subscribers is growing. If you’ve got to this point, then the only question to ask is why aren’t you already subscribed to the WebRTC Insights if WebRTC interests you so much?

You can read more about the available plans for WebRTC Insights and if you have any questions – just contact Tsahi.

👉 Oh – and you shouldn’t take only our word for how great WebRTC Insights – just see what Google’s own Serge Lachapelle has to say about it:

Still not sure? Want to sample an issue? Just reach out to me.

The post Third time’s a charm: WebRTC Insights, 3 years in appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Over a year ago, Philipp Hancke came to me with the idea of creating a new set of courses. Ones that will dig deeper into the heart of the protocols used in WebRTC. This being a huge undertaking, we decided to split it into several courses, and focus on the first one – Low-level WebRTC protocols.

We received positive feedback about it, so we ended up working on our second course in this series – Higher-level WebRTC protocols.

Why the need for additional WebRTC courses?

There is always something more to learn once you started the journey with the question “What is WebRTC?“.

The initial courses at WebRTC Course were focused on giving an understanding of the different components of WebRTC itself and on getting developers to be able to design and then implement their application.

What was missing in all that was a closer look at the protocols themselves. Of looking at what goes on in the network, and being able to understand what goes over the wire. Which is why we started off with the protocols courses.

Where the Low-level WebRTC protocols looks at directly what goes to the network with WebRTC, our newer Higher-level WebRTC protocols is taking it up one level:

This time, we’re looking at the protocols that make use of RTP and RTCP to make the job of real time communications manageable.

If you don’t know exactly what header extensions are, and how they work (and why), or the types of bandwidth estimation algorithms that WebRTC uses – and again – how and why – then this course is for you.

If you know RTP and RTCP really well, because you’ve worked in the video conferencing industry, or have done SIP for years – then this course is definitely for you.

Just understanding the types of RTP header extensions that WebRTC ends up using, many of them proprietary, is going to be quite a surprise for you.

Our WebRTC Protocols courses

Got a use case where you need to render remote machines using WebRTC? These require sitting at the cutting edge of WebRTC, or more accurately and a slightly skewed angle versus what the general population does with WebRTC (including Google).

Taking upon yourself such a use case means you’ll need to rely more heavily on your own expertise and understanding of WebRTC.

There are now 2 available protocols courses for you:

1. Low-level WebRTC protocols
2. Higher-level WebRTC protocols (half-complete. Call it a work in progress)

And there are 2 different ways to purchase them:

1. Each one separately – low and high
2. As part of the bigger ALL INCLUDED WebRTC Developer bundle (the Higher-level course was just added to it)

You should probably hurry though…

• There’s a 40% discount 🤯 on the Higher-level WebRTC protocols course. This early-bird discount will be available until the end of this month ($180 instead of $300)
• There’s also a 20% discount on all courses and ebooks. Call it a summer sale – this one is available using discount code SUMMER

Check out my WebRTC courses

The post New: Higher-Level WebRTC Protocols course appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Around 6 years ago I launched the first WebRTC course here. Since then, that grew into its own separate website and multiple courses and bundles.

Next month, another round of office hours is about to begin. In each such round, there are live sessions where I teach something about WebRTC and then open the floor for general questions. That’s on top of all the recorded lessons, the chat widget and slack channel that are available.

In this round (starting February 6), I am experimenting with something new. This time, I will be adding home assignments…

The dynamics of office hours

The office hours are 10-12 lessons that take place on a weekly cadence at two separate time zones, to fit everyone.

In each I pick and choose a topic that is commonly discussed and try to untangle it from a slightly different angle than what you’ll be finding in the course itself. I then let people ask questions.

The office hours are semi-private. Usually with 2-6 participants each time. This gives the ability to really ask the questions you care about and need to deal with in your own WebRTC application.

Why home assignments?

As part of my new role as the Chief Product Officer at Spearline, I asked to enroll in a course – CPO Bootcamp (the best one if you’re in Israel). It is grueling as hell but more importantly – highly useful and actionable.

One of the components in that bootcamp is home assignment. They are given every week, then they get checked and feedback is given. They make me think about the things I am doing at Spearline and how to improve and finetune our roadmap and strategy. I even share them with my own team – being able to delegate is great, but it is more about the shared brainpower.

As with anything else, when I see something that is so good, I try to figure out if and where I can make use of that idea.

Which brings me to the WebRTC courses home assignments.

Home assignments = implementation AND feedback

For me, home assignments fit the best as part of the office hours.

Here’s what we’re going to do:

• You come to the office hours
• I share a topic related to WebRTC. In this round, the focus will be on requirements and architecture and design – and the planning of it all
• Then, I will present the home assignment for the given round
• You will have time until the following office hour to write down the assignment and submit it – in Google Docs or a Microsoft Word file
• Once submitted, I’ll be reviewing and writing my feedback

The assignments relate and are focused on your WebRTC application. Not to something unrelated. Their purpose is to make you think, revisit and evaluate the things you’ve done and decided.

They are also building upon one another, each touching a different aspect of the design and architecture.

In a way, this is a unique opportunity to get another pair of eyes (mine) looking at your set of requirements, architecture and decisions and offering a different viewpoint.

Getting the most of the WebRTC courses

If you are planning to learn WebRTC, then now is the best time possible.

Those who have enrolled to the course in the last 12 months or have renewed their course subscription can join the office hours and take part in the home assignments.

Office hours will start  February 6.

If you haven’t enrolled yet, then you should 😉More information on how to enroll can be found on the WebRTC courses site.

The post WebRTC course home assignments are here appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Almost a year ago, testRTC, the company I co-founded, got acquired by Spearline. During that time, I got to know the great team there and the huge opportunity that Spearline has.

Since the above feels corny and a cliché to me as I write it, I’ll stop here.

To make a long story short:

• Spearline acquired testRTC (Spearline has its HQ in Ireland)
• Now they had 2 separate product lines: Voice Assure and testRTC
• As time went by, it was apparent that 2 is just a beginning
• And also that someone needs to manage product management as a whole
• Which is where I came in – they asked, and I said yes
• So now I am CPO at Spearline 🕺

What does this mean?

First off, I am excited. Very.

It has been some time since I had a team to work with as their direct manager. It will also be the first time I get to manage product managers.

It also means that I am going to be investing a lot more of my time and attention at Spearline. Which is great, as I really love interacting with the people there already (I wouldn’t have accepted the role otherwise).

For my consulting business, it means that I will be shrinking it down considerably. I won’t be doing much consulting moving forward. It is somewhat sad, as I really loved helping people and hearing their stories and challenges. Hopefully, I will still get to do it in other ways.

What is going to stay, are all the initiatives that have taken place around BlogGeek.me over the years:

• My writing here on this blog will continue, though probably at a lower frequency
• The courses and reports will continue to be supported and updated. Me and Philipp Hancke are working to complete the new Low-level Protocols Course and we have plans for a few other courses after this one
• In the same token, WebRTC Insights is going to continue as a service
• And so will WebRTC Weekly and the Kranky Geek events
• From time to time, I’ll probably run an initiative or two here. Because I just can’t stop myself 😉

All in all, it is time to continue and grow, and in a direction I have never expected I’ll find myself again.

The post CPO at Spearline and what it means to BlogGeek.me appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

This week I took the time to update my WebRTC Developer Tools Landscape. I do this every time I update my report, just to make sure it is all aligned and… up to date.

A few quick thoughts I had while doing this:

• Vendors come and go
  • We see this all the time
  • At the time of writing, I am aware of 2-3 additional changes that couldn’t fit to this update simply because of timing
• Testing & Monitoring is becoming more important
  • There are more vendors there than they used to
  • With my testRTC hat on, I can say this is a good thing
  • Especially since we’re the best game in town 😉
• CPaaS is crowded
  • And becoming more so
  • Is there room for everyone there?
  • How will this market look like moving forward?
  • Who should you be selecting for your next project?
  • All these questions is what I am covering in the WebRTC API report

Why is your company not there?

The WebRTC Developer Tools Landscape will never be complete. People always get pissed off at me when I publish it, not understanding why their company isn’t there. My answer to this is a simple one – because I don’t know what it is that you are doing.

They then get even angrier. What they should do at that point is ask themselves why I don’t know them enough. I have lived and breathed WebRTC since it was first announced. So if I don’t know their company and product, how do they expect others to learn about them?

I don’t think I am unique or special. Just that if you want to be in a landscape infographic that covers WebRTC, you might as well want to make sure people who deal with WebRTC and help others figure out what tools to use will know what it is that you’re doing.

What about that report?

The report has been going strong for some 8 years now, with an update taking place every 8-12 months. It has been 12 months, so it definitely needed an update.

2 vendors were removed from the report and 3 new vendors added.

I’ve also decided to “upgrade” the term Embed/Embeddable/Embedded to Prebuilt. The reason behind it is the progress and popularity of these types of solutions in the video API space. Most CPaaS vendors today that offer a video API are also offering some form of higher level abstraction in the form of a ready made application – be it a full reference app, a UIKit, or a Prebuilt component.

The report will be published on 22 September. If you want to purchase it, there’s a 20% discount available at the moment – from now and until its publication.

Check out more about my Choosing a WebRTC API Platform report.

The post The WebRTC Developer Tools Landscape 2022 (+report) appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

I had a few updates to write with no specific theme to them. Mostly about things just completed and a few upcoming projects and events. Then it dawned on me that I’ve been at it for a bit over 10 years now (!)

On January 5, 2012 I published the first post on this blog. I just left RADVISION for Amdocs, and wanted to have a place of my own out there that won’t be controlled by any vendor. So I started BlogGeek.me. I didn’t know what I was going to write about, but I did know it will include some 3-4 posts about WebRTC before I move on to other technical issues.

That first WebRTC post? Got published on March 8, 2012. It was about what’s WebRTC. Fast forward 10 years later, and more people today know BlogGeek.me than know me as Tsahi. And in many ways, BlogGeek.me is synonymous with WebRTC articles. Not what I had in mind when I started, but I am definitely happy with where it led me.

Anyways, here are a few updates on my ongoing projects, as well as where to find me.

Free eBook: WebRTC for Business People

Earlier this month, I updated my WebRTC for Business People ebook.

Its last update took place in 2019, before the pandemic, so it really needed to get up to speed with where we are now. I worked on this update in the last couple of months, updating much of the content and replacing many of the showcased vendors.

I’d like to thank Daily for picking up the sponsorship for this work. They’re one of the fascinating CPaaS vendors out there innovating in the domain of UX/UI.

Download the WebRTC for Business People ebook for free

WebRTC Trends for 2022

I just finished my WebRTC Trends for 2022 workshop. Did it twice in parallel to accommodate different time zones and had a goodly sized audience joining live to the 6 hours in total.

During the workshop we went through many topics. I tried covering everything I think is relevant for 2022 when it comes to WebRTC, so that you can prepare properly.

• If you missed this, you can now enroll to it as a course and access the recorded content
• If you want this as a private session in your company, contact me

WebRTC Training Courses

The Advanced WebRTC Architecture course is due for another update.

The above image indicates the numbers for the course at the moment.

Around 15-20 lessons are going to be updated and recorded again – to make sure content is relevant and fresh.

One of the lessons will be dropped with 2-3 new lessons being added.

Until I finish all that work, I am announcing a 10% discount on all courses, ebooks and workshops on my webrtccourse.com website. Just use the coupon code 10YEARS.

If you enroll in the courses now, you’ll have a 1-year access to them which will include all of the upcoming updates.

WebRTC Insights

Philipp Hancke is running the WebRTC Insights with me. This is fun to do, especially with a good friend and partner. We’ve grown the offering in the last few months, adding video release notes interpretation for WebRTC, color coding for issues, etc.

This weekend we worked on getting our subscribers a detailed summary of Facebook’s RTC@Scale event – so they can focus on what they find relevant in the 5-hour event.

We’ve celebrated a year of WebRTC Insights recently – if you’d like to join our service for the coming year and be updated on everything technical (and non-technical) about WebRTC just let us know.

Enterprise Connect 2022: Here I come!

After two years at home, it is time to pack a bag for the first time and see a plane from the inside.

I will be at Enterprise Connect 2022, taking place in March in Orlando. This will also be my first opportunity to see in real life (!) the people from Spearline who acquired my company, testRTC. I’ll be going there to represent Spearline and showcase testRTC to whoever wants to listen.

If you are there – let me know – I’ll be happy to meet you as well.

Kranky Geek Virtual 2022 Spring

We’re going to have another Kranky Geek event. We plan to have it in April 2022.

At the moment, we’re working on the sponsors and speakers list. If you’re one of those – let me know (we keep a tight ship, so I can’t promise anything).

Here’s for the next 10 years

The last 10 years have been fun. I am actively thinking of what will happen with WebRTC and communications in the coming years. There are some trends that are just around the corner while others are more long term in their nature (web3 anyone?).

Here’s to seeing you in virtual and in person during 2022 and beyond 😎

The post WebRTC, BlogGeek.me, 2022 & 10 years of blogging appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

This week the announcement became public. The company I co-founded with a few friends, testRTC, got acquired by Spearline. It is the end of a chapter and an opening of the next one.

For starters – I am still going to do what I did so far – have fun and help companies with their WebRTC and CPaaS challenges.

I tried to keep testRTC at an arm’s length from BlogGeek.me and what I do here just because… well… not sure why. Probably to stay as impartial as I can with the things that I do. That said, it is probably a good time to explain where we are with testRTC and our support for WebRTC applications.

Where are we with testRTC?

We’ve started testRTC with the intent of providing a self service, cloud hosted testing solution for those developing with WebRTC. Along the way, we’ve expanded our product lines to include 3 separate domains with 5 different products:

1. Testing
   • testingRTC – our marquee testing product that can be used today for regression, stress and performance testing
2. Monitoring
   • watchRTC – a passive monitoring service that integrates with the WebRTC client application collecting data from real users, gauging quality of service that they get, both in aggregate and on the individual user level
   • upRTC – an active monitoring service, validating your application’s uptime and quality, able to understand your SLA
3. Support
   • qualityRTC – the WFH (Work From Home) support tool focusing on connectivity and quality issues by offering end users a self service route and reducing average handling time for support teams
   • probeRTC – continuous network monitoring service for office locations to deal with network fluctuations from specific locations to your WebRTC cloud service

Simply put, we are the only vendor today offering support for the full lifecycle of your WebRTC application – from development to deployment and long term maintenance of the service. We do that at scale, in the cloud, with a big smile 😃

And then we met Spearline, and found a common ground.

Who and what is Spearline?

Spearline offers testing and monitoring for your telephony services.

They have a large global deployment with real phone numbers across 70+ countries and carriers worldwide – landline and mobile. If you need your phone numbers tested and validated for their quality and performance (and you do), then you go to Spearline. Why? Because without actually testing a number, your only insight that a number isn’t working (say your sales line) is to get a customer to complain about it – which is way too late.

This all made perfect sense for us at testRTC. When we were approached, it was easy to figure out that this falls into this category:

SYNERGY

• Same domain
• Similar customer base
• Different technologies

We’re completing Spearline in a few ways (WebRTC being an important part of it), and Spearline completing testRTC in other ways (telephony, scale and enterprise sales to give a few of the things we were after).

Which leads me to rocket surgery.

Rocket surgery

I had a technical call the other day. Related to BlogGeek.me. Someone at the call said “rocket surgery” at some point. It took me a few seconds to deconstruct that and understand it – he probably meant to say rocket science or brain surgery – just to indicate that they’re doing things that are hard, but not that hard (he said “this isn’t rocket surgery”).

Then it dawned on me. Rocket surgery is the best term I have for what we’re currently doing.

We’re marrying the best of both worlds here at testRTC & Spearline, so we can now offer our customers rocket surgery solutions. Things that no other vendor out there can do for you.

And that excites me – the things we can achieve and the plans we’re making for the future as part of this acquisition.

What changes for BlogGeek.me?

Nothing and everything.

(can you spot the 10 differences between the images above?)

I am continuing my work at testRTC as before. Not as CEO (never liked that role), but as head of products for testRTC (which is kinda like a small CEO). testRTC is my baby. I want to see it grow and flourish.

But then again, I like the diversity and the thrill and fun of doing everything. And Spearline were kind enough to allow me to continue with my extra curricular activities. These include the courses, the weekly, insights, consulting and Kranky Geek.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my future. And what else I want to do. I don’t have the answers to it yet. For the foreseeable future though, this is going to be helping you with your WebRTC and CPaaS needs.

Onward and upward

2021 has been a rollercoaster. I enjoyed the ride.

Here’s for a 2022 that is thrilling, exhilarating and fun.

The post Spearline acquiring testRTC – this is rocket surgery appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Philipp Hancke and myself started this new thing called WebRTC Insights a year ago. We work well together, so we simply searched what we can do other than the WebRTC codelab, which was and still is a fun project.

WebRTC Insights is meant to help vendors sift through the technical (and non-technical) information that is out there and ever changing around WebRTC. Anything from bugs found, important changes in the WebRTC implementation to security issues raised and many other topics.

The idea? If you are a developer who uses WebRTC on a daily basis and relies on it, we can reduce the time you spend on finding what can bite you in the back when you weren’t looking. And we can definitely reduce the risk of that happening.

A year has gone by. The service evolved through this time, as we added more insights into it. Time to look at what we’ve done 😀

WebRTC Insights by the numbers

We started small. The first WebRTC Insights issue looked at 6 issues, 7 PSAs and 2 market insights. 4 pages in total. Now we’re at 15-20 issues on average (twice as much when a Safari release happened) and 10 pages (or more).

In numbers, over the year this turned out to be:

26 Insights issues, 331 issues & bugs, 120 PSAs, 17 security vulnerabilities, 74 market insights and 185 pages. Phew…

Bugs

In the past decade we have had more than 13,000 issues filed against libwebrtc, Google’s implementation of WebRTC that we all use in Chrome (and all other browsers in one way or another), with close to 5,000 of them external bug reports. In addition to that close to 2,000 external chromium bugs related to WebRTC.

WebRTC is a complex piece of software and staying on top of it requires quite some effort. While the development activity on WebRTC is much lower these days (at a third of the peak change rate back in 2017) there is still a surprising amount of issues we have to look at.

WebRTC Insights started from conversations about WebRTC issues and the challenges they bring between us. We have long looked at and discussed bugs, but this happened over chat and we never wrote it up. Nowadays we write up a summary, our thoughts and the potential impact each bug has. Quite often we learn something from it.

In the process we actually created an annotated list of issues that we can then refer to when we encounter new issues. So when Tsahi complained about an increase in video jitter statistics recently, Philipp just pointed him to the issue where we discussed this topic (you see, Tsahi’s memory isn’t what it used to be).

Mailing lists and PSAs

“Public Service Announcements” or PSAs are a way for the WebRTC team (and Philipp) to communicate breaking changes in WebRTC. They range from changes to the C++ APIs to the plan-b deprecation and typically require action from developers using WebRTC in their applications.

We also list WebRTC-related Intent-to-ship from the Chromium process. This is a mandatory step in the process to launch WebRTC features that require Javascript API changes. In the last year we have mostly seen changes related to screen sharing which then turned into features of Google Meet – yet were available to other users of the platform as well.

Last but not least we do monitor the W3C working group and what happens there as it has a long term impact on where WebRTC is going.

The crazy profession syndrome: WebRTC trials in Chrome

WebRTC uses field trials in Chrome to roll out changes that have some technical risk. We identify them which gives us insights into what might be a possible root cause for issues that are hard to reproduce locally. The best example for this recently was this report by Facebook where an experimental change to reduce the noise during opus dtx caused a large AV desync issue. We had been tracking the experiment for a couple of weeks at that point.

Security patches in WebRTC

We keep track of WebRTC related CVEs in Chrome (17 in the last twelve months), determine whether they only affect Chromium or when they affect native WebRTC and need to be cherry-picked into forks of the native library.

Where is the market headed?

This part is the bird’s eye view that we offer. The rest of the insights are the low level details developers need. Here, we look at the bigger picture of what WebRTC is and the market forces around it.

We bump into tweets, posts, LinkedIn messages and other articles out there – and when we feel they are relevant and important to your work, we mention them. And explain where we see this trend headed and what you should be aware of.

The market insights are designed and handpicked for the clients we serve in WebRTC Insights.

We’re evolving

Over time, we’ve evolved the service.

Security and Chrome trials were added later on. We are now experimenting ourselves with short video explainers of each libwebrtc release (=once a month) and its implications to developers. We got some great feedback on it, so we’re likely to keep it as part of our format.

There are now also 3 different plans to the WebRTC Insights:

• Light – the biweekly insights email
• Premium – Light + monthly brainstorming session
• Exclusive – Premium + unlimited access to courses

Want to join us for the ride this coming year?

👉 To learn more, check us out at WebRTC Insights

👉 You can leave us a message there to get a sample copy of one of our latest insights issue

The post A year of WebRTC Insights appeared first on BlogGeek.me.