September 2013 Daitan White Paper Web Conferencing: It should be easy THE REASONS WHY IT IS NOT AND THE PATHS TO OVERCOME THE CHALLENGES. Highly Reliable Software Development Services http://www.daitangroup.com/webconferencing
Web Conferencing: It should be easy. 1 THE PROBLEM: CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? Consider this scenario: You are presenting a commercial proposal to your big customer. A Sales Engineer will support you from a different location. Three people from the customer organization will be in the call. All you need is to set and invite people to a web conference and be able to talk to everyone and present a slide deck over the web. That should be simple, right? Reality: that is anything but simple. It is not uncommon for web conferences to be delayed or go awry because attendees were not able to connect timely. They might be using an unsupported browser, had the wrong version of Java or Flash, could not get their microphone to work, or simply "Can you hear me now?" We have had enough technology to be able to enjoy good web conferencing for a while. But, still, the reality is that we often spend a third of the time allocated for a web conference with the logistics of setting it up and getting participants on board. Why is it so difficult for us to agree on how we are going to meet, talk and collaborate on the web? This is the subject of in this Daitan White Paper. If you are in the business of helping people to communicate over the web, please read on.
2 CHALLENGES WITH EXISTING CONFERENCING APPROACHES 2.1 TRADITIONAL VOICE CONFERENCING A conferencing platform connected to good old PSTN lines is still the most reliable and available way to get more than 2 people to talk over distance. It has been more than 100 years since Graham Bell s first conversation over a phone line and there has been enough standardization so that any phone can connect to any other phone number in the world. Cell and IP phones came later and also inherited the ability to connect to the traditional phone network. Traditional telephony-based conferencing platforms are still the most reliable and universally accessible solution for real-time communication among more than two people. Welcome to the conference center. Please dial your 5-digit access code, followed by pound. Speak your name. There are three people in the conference room. You are now going to be connected. <Beep> So, anyone can get connected to a telephony-based conferencing platform. The audio quality is consistent and is not affected when your kids in the other room (or the colleague in the next cubicle) decide to stream music off the web. That is why when the call really matters, businesses still use traditional telephony (even when there is separate web-conference for data sharing). It works, but conveying ideas using only voice is so 20th century With the increasing availability of bandwidth and the need for data sharing features, the only reason why telephony-based conferencing is still in use is that we haven t replicated its reliability and universal accessibility with IP-based technologies. 2.2 PEER-TO-PEER CONSUMER VOIP APPLICATIONS Consumer VoIP applications became popular in the 2000 s and are great for ad-hoc person-to-person calls. Some of those applications are platformspecific (e.g. Apple Facetime) some are available cross-platforms (e.g. Microsoft Skype) and can support full desktop integration, with presence detection, chat, video-conferencing, screen sharing, file transfer, etc. These apps are available at no or low additional cost to consumers. Reliance on peer-to-peer connections eliminate the need for a central gateway, but limits the conference to a handful of participants. The challenge for business use is that those consumer applications do not provide facilities to set meeting rooms, manage invitations and notifications, interface with calendar applications. Because they leverage mostly resources at the client device and establish peerto-peer audio and video connections (the media streams are not mixed and consolidated at a
central gateway), they cannot not scale beyond a few participants and can only connect peers using the same set of technologies. 2.3 CLOUD-BASED WEB CONFERENCING Cloud-based Web Conferencing services are meant to overcome the challenges above. The conference bridge and gateway run in the cloud and are accessed through VoIP devices or standard browsers from any platform, OS, desktop or mobile. They can support all the standard functionality you would expect: chat, talk, file and screen sharing, white board, and videoconference. The challenges when connecting to laptops and mobile devices are that web apps don t (yet) have enough access to the end device peripherals (camera, video, and microphone) at the level needed to provide a good user experience and to local resources needed to run audio/video codecs. Implementing video-conferencing functionality in a pure web app is difficult (if not impossible), so most services require a Java run-time engine (JRE) and a Flash player (a few vendors offer a self-contained browser plug-in to do the same). So, cloud-based web conferencing works as long as you have a relatively new version of one of the support browsers. And the right version of Flash and Java and proper firewall and audio/video settings. And if you are lucky. Problem is, most people are not always lucky. Compatibility issues disrupt the setup of conference calls, and that often is an unacceptable risk when you need to communicate with customers. 2.4 PROPRIETARY WEB CONFERENCING SOFTWARE So most companies end up using proprietary Web Conferencing software like WebEx and GoToMeeting. These avoid the OS/Browser/Java/Flash compatibility issues by installing a native application (which is available for the most common platforms). Installing a native application is a huge inconvenience and obstacle for adoption, but most business users and corporate IT departments have already accepted the installation of software clients. The status quo of web conferencing is to require the installation of a native app in every end device, which might take several minutes if done at the beginning of the conference call. The setup of conference calls with people we haven t interacted with before still carries the risk, but using one of the mainstream proprietary applications give us the perceived safety of If it doesn t work, it is not because I picked the wrong solution. Everyone uses it. Proprietary web conferencing is not the ideal solution, but it is the status quo. Convincing people to change will require a significantly better solution.
2.5 CONSUMER WEB CONFERENCING Google has recently introduced Hangout. It deserves special mention because it is functionally similar to the applications most businesses use today for professional web conferencing and it is available to all free of charge. Nobody in the Communications space can ignore the possibility of a consumer application like Hangout disrupting the business web conferencing market. Hangout let attendees engage through data, voice, video interaction from the most common platforms (desktop, Android, IOS). It requires the installation of a native/proprietary app (which comes installed by default in Android devices). The fact that Hangout is tightly integrated with Google s suite of applications (and particularly insistent in using Google+ as the call coordination platform) makes it less appealing to business users in the short term, but nobody in the Communications space can ignore the possibility of a consumer application like Hangout disrupting the business web conferencing market.
3 CAN WE DO BETTER? THE ROAD AHEAD So, as we reviewed in the previous chapter, the status quo is that consumers and businesses are using Skype and social media applications for ad hoc communications. For structured business communication, proprietary web conferencing solutions are the mainstream solution, often complemented by a PSTN voice conference for reliable audio. Use of video-conferencing is still uncommon outside the boundaries of an organization. So, what options companies building web conferencing solutions have to address the challenges of building a better solution? Here are some strategies we have seen in the industry. 3.1 IF YOU CANNOT BEAT THEM Rather than trying to compete directly with the incumbents, many companies find ways to integrate with the dominant solutions. That is a strategy to be considered. For example, a traditional telecom operator monetizing conferencing through the sales of voice minutes, could decide to offer its PSTN voice service with a web conferencing solution by tightly integrating a commercial product like WebEx. This would minimize obstacle of adoption of the solution and increase the potential for revenues. In another example, a cloud-based web conferencing solution could, for example, assume most people have already installed Skype clients in their devices and implement the transcoding capabilities to allow Skype clients to join a conference call. Those integration strategies give up some of the control over the customer base and have to be seen as a transitional solution, but they ease the adoption by end users and can significantly increase the target audience for the solution. 3.2 CLOUD-BASED CONFERENCING WITHOUT JRE, FLASH OR NATIVE APPLICATION? There are many vendors offering full web conferencing functionality in the cloud requiring the use of a Java Runtime Engine (JRE) and Flash Players (which, as we saw before, is a major obstacle for adoption and major nuisance for users during a conference call). There are many vendors offering cloud-based web conferencing without requiring JRE and Flash player, but they invariably rely on separate PSTN or VoIP connections for voice and do not support video conferencing. So, the industry has figured out how to do chat, presence detection, and screen sharing from a web application running on a browser. The technical challenge is to provide real-time voice and video support without JRE and Flash. A few vendors support audio and video conference through a browser plug-in. The plug-in includes a media engine capable of accessing speakers and microphones and encoding and decoding audio and video and can be used to support real-time communications. Compared to a native application, a browser plugin installs faster and has less chance of triggering OS-level security alarms. Compared to an applet that requires JRE, a browser plug-in is potentially less prone to compatibility issues.
Cloud-based web conferencing using browser plug-ins to provide the audio/video capabilities seem to be a step in the right direction compared to the market status quo. If browsers had a media engine embedded in them by default, it would be possible to offer web conferencing through a cloud/web applications without the need to install anything in the client machine. That is the promise of the WebRTC standard. 3.3 BETTING ON WEBRTC WebRTC is an emerging standard to enable real-time communications (voice, text, video, data, etc.). The real-time communications engine is embedded directly in the web-browser. If universally adopted, WebRTC promises to enable real-time communications from any device without the installation of a native client (other than the web browser, which supposedly is already in every device). There is a lot of momentum behind WebRTC in the communications development community. WebRTC could generate a wave of creative uses of communications, including web conferencing solutions that can offer universal access and good user experience. WebRTC enables application developers to incorporate rich real-time communication capabilities (e.g. click-to-call buttons, chat rooms, video conferencing, screen share, etc.) to apps and webpages with just a few lines of JavaScript code. Adding support for WebRTC clients to web conferencing platform is becoming an important competitive factor for anyone in this space and could also become an elegant universal solution for ad-hoc and structured real-time communications over the web. But, for WebRTC to deliver on its promises, it will need to grain adoption among all important browsers. Started by Chrome developers, WebRTC is now a proposed W3C standard and has been adopted by Mozilla Firefox and Opera Browsers. But Microsoft Internet Explorer and Apple Safari currently do not have public plans of supporting it.
4 CONCLUSION We will eventually get to the scenario where we can take real-time audio/video/data collaboration over the web for granted. Where we can pick up any device and just connect to another person or a group of people and communicate seamlessly. Where we can set a conference call and be confident everyone will be able to connect and focus on content rather than on the logistics of the call. Web Conferencing should be easy, but it isn t yet. Part of it has to do with standardization and the actions of the device and platform vendors wanting to control the market. But there are technology implementation challenges as well. It will be a long time before the world converges on common technologies, so solutions need to be able to work across platforms, protocols and audio/video codecs. We want universal, platform-agnostic access to anyone. It took a hundred years for traditional telephony to reach that point. We certainly expect Web-based technologies to get there faster. ABOUT DAITAN GROUP Daitan Group is a consulting and software development service provider with strong focus on IP-based communications. We partner with technology vendors to help them develop their next software solution in Communications, Mobile and Web/Cloud-applications. In several of past projects, Daitan engineers have helped Conferencing, Call Center, and Communications solution providers to face the challenge of platform-independent web conferencing, working on integrating solutions with other commercial products, building gateways to connect different technologies, implementing support for technologies like WebRTC or improving the cloud-based conferencing platforms. To know more about what Daitan can do for you, please visit http://daitangroup.com