WebRTC App Development: The Challenges, Business Applications, and the Future

Ashlin Jose

Ashlin Jose

Brand Communication & UX Writer

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WebRTC app development Company has become the most preferring solution in both internal and external communication in businesses. Within the past few years, the adoption of WebRTC in the tech community has grown to its peak. The WebRTC in video chat apps is significant for long-lasting business relations with your business partners. 

WebRTC in detail 

WebRTC, Web Real-Time Communication, is API-based technology that allows peer-to-peer communication among web browsers and mobile applications. It refers to open-source projects, which allow the transmission of audio, video, and data. 

The WebRTC developers consider it as a simple as well as a complex technology. It is considered simple due to its ease of implementation. There is a use of five to ten lines of code to organize peer-to-peer video communication between two browsers. The complexity of the technology comes from the specificity of WebRTC and must adapt to various browsers and this adapting becomes only possible when it works correctly. The connections can be made user-friendly by eliminating the need for native plugins and app installations. WebRTC app development is implemented in order to make their web applications more reliable, faster, and secure. The features of WebRTC are provided in the off-the-shelf solutions as well, which can be easily integrated with other software. 

Now let’s dig into more details regarding WebRTC app development that lead you through in choosing the best suitable solution for your businesses. 

How does WebRTC work?

The main focus of WebRTC is to allow real-time audio and video communication between participants who use web browsers for conversations, locating others, and bypassing firewalls. Embedded within a browser WebRTC utilizes JavaScript APIs and HTML5. The features of a WebRTC application include,

  • sending and receiving streaming video and audio
  • opening/closing connections and report errors
  • retrieving network configuration data, such as IP addresses, firewalls, NATs (Network Address Translators), and application ports, that are needed in order to send and receive data from and to another client using the WebRTC API
  • transmitting media data, such as image resolution and video codecs.

WebRTC provides some APIs that can be used in the web applications to send and receive streams of data, they are:

  • RTCDataChannel for transmission of generic data
  • RTCPeerConnection for video and audio transmissions, bandwidth configuration, and encryption
  • MediaStream for accessing the multimedia data streams from the devices like microphones, webcams, shared desktops, or digital cameras 

 

WebRTC: Internal Working

WebRTC is simply just a way to send and receive UDP Packages within the browsers. It knows about the transfer of media, both audio and video. WebRTC allows a direct connection, that is, peer-to-peer. According to the developers, WebRTC is a simple thing: it opens the UDP port, knows the partner’s IP port, and wraps the traffic in RTP. 

There are 7 basic steps between the capture from the camera and the video playback on the screen: 

Capture of camera: The API of the browser allows us to ask users for accessing the microphone or camera – navigator. One of the difficulties that we face in the webRTC is that we can’t send media streams immediately to the interlocutor since they weigh a lot without compression. Therefore, the data needed to be compressed before its transfer.

Coding: Since compression is needed for the audio and video streams, the codecs are necessary. There are a broad set of codecs and part of them are available in webRTC. 

Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) Packaging: Data that contains information about the order of the packages are packed in Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP). Since the packages can come in different orders or even they can be lost, this one is a mandatory step. 

Network transmission over UDP (User Datagram Protocol): Data is sent as a formed UDP (User Datagram Protocol) package. While comparing UDP with TCP, UDP has minimal interval between packages. Packages being lost, arriving late, and ending up in the wrong order are some of the demerits that come up with UDP. 

Unpacking RTP: At this stage, the order of packages is restored. Video traffic is transmitted and received to and from the decoder.

Decoding: Data will be sent in the correct order and we get a pure video stream at the output.

Drawing on the screen: The stream is attached to the video and will get the image.

In some cases, you will notice that the video is covered with squares and freezes during the peer-to-peer communication between two browsers. And this is due to the loss of packages caused by a lossy network or random loss (that is, part of packages are left in the house walls), packages can be dropped by mistake (bugs in the network equipment or OS), and network congestion. 

We need to bypass package loss in order to achieve stable video communication and there are four main solutions that help in implementing it.

Network tuning: The routes are made optimal and it is according to the principle of the minor ping amount the media server is selected.

Decrease the bitrate: Bitrate = FPS*Quality*Resolution

You can increase or decrease the bitrate by altering the parameters such as FPS, quality, and resolution.

Jitter buffer: There will be a request for the missing package. When there is a massive loss, the frieze is short since there is more time to request a keyframe. The additional constant delay is the main minus of the approach.

Forward error correction: The codec may duplicate some data. Thus, when data is sent over to the client, there will be certain duplicates, and this can exacerbate network congestion.

WebRTC – Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages of WebRTC

It has implementations for all platform

  • For high-quality communication use modern audio and video codecs
  • P2P = end-to-end encryption
  • Open-source
  • Encrypted and secured SRTP and DTLS
  • Browsers agree directly
  • A built-in mechanism of content grabbing
  • Versatility – As long as the browser supports WebRTC, a standard-based application works well on any OS.
  • Flexibility of implementation of management interface is based on JavaScript and HTML5

Disadvantages of WebRTC : 

WebRTC has a high price of maintenance which is due to the need for powerful servers.


WebRTC in Business Applications 

The WebRTC app development company’s technologies involve the primary types of application services with video and audio calls. Other than these uses the WebRTC solutions have applications in many other areas of business sectors. It has high demand in telehealth, online education, surveillance, virtual reality gaming, streaming, the Internet of Things, etc. 


WebRTC: Future and Prediction 

In 2016, the worldwide market value of products using WebRTC was $10.7 million. It was in 2017 that WebRTC had its turning point when Microsoft Edge and iOS Safari 11 began supporting it. The Market Study Report notes that the global WebRTC market size is expected to reach $16,750 million in 2026. The WebRTC market extends out to North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South America, and Africa.  

Currently, Google prioritizes the WebRTC app development. Thus, the future of WebRTC can be cloudless.


Main trends for WebRTC:

  • The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will be developing rapidly.
  • Codecs AV1 and VP9 will be modernized.
  • The tools such as noise suppression and background blur are connected to the implementation of WebRTC in chrome. These tools were already developed and will be improved in the future.  
  • The meeting space that WebRTC can provide will increase and it will influence the complexity of solutions

WebRTC’s future is associated with the innovation of technologies in the global markets. Since WebRTC is a W3C standard anybody can influence its development which can imply great prospects. 

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