Lisa Larson-Kelley is a well established expert on web video, and recently she has applied that expertise to the WebRTC standard for HTML5 use of in-browser video, audio and data channels. If you’re new to WebRTC, the simplest and most common example of how to use it is to build video chat directly into your web application.
The uses are much wider than this, with the ability to use this encrypted Peer to Peer channel for data exchange as well as video and audio conferencing applications. I think the great promise of this is the ability to use WebRTC for “in context communications”.
WebRTC is very much an emerging standard, and there’s a lot to learn. That’s where Lisa comes in. An experienced technologist and trainer (see her LearnFromLisa.com site), Lisa has launched a “WebRTC Fundamentals” online course that I highly recommend.
The course is hosted by Pluralsight, which provides a nice subscription model for a variety of technology courses. Pluralsight allows you to easily jump between the chapters, and Lisa’s content is broken up into lots of short videos that are informative, to the point, and perfect for the attention-span-impaired like myself.
Her WebRTC fundamentals course covers use cases, architecture, the server technologies, and the API itself. Practical examples are provided using Peer.js and SimpleWebRTC. According to Lisa, she built this course because there are not a lot of simple examples out there. Her goal is to make the complex simple, and make WebRTC more accessible.
As Lisa points out, there are an expected 6 billion devices by 2018 that will support WebRTC. She predicts applications in the financial services, healthcare, and insurance industries will all be big markets (and there are undoubtedly a lot more applications).
All of this spells out big opportunities for innovative startups, established enterprises with a creative streak, as well as developers like our team at AgilityFeat. But you do need to know what you’re jumping into, and Lisa’s course will give you the knowledge you need to get started.
Scott Hanselman also has done an interesting podcast with Lisa about WebRTC. Check out the podcast here. Among other things, Lisa points out in the podcast that WebRTC can be used for Machine to Machine (M2M) or Internet of Things (IoT) communications. I also love how Lisa states that now is the perfect time to take a WebRTC application to market specifically because not many people are doing it yet. Do you want to be the innovator who captures the market earlier, or do you want to wait until you have to follow your competitors to this space?
If you’re interested in keeping up with WebRTC technologies, we humbly suggest our free weekly newsletter RealTimeWeekly and our upcoming book RealTimeWeb.co.
