Beyond WebRTC 1.0

 Highlights

 Impact on my application

 Standardization status

 Details

 

 Highlights

At the end of September there was a W3C meeting in Lisbon. Among other things, future features of WebRTC (that could be added following version 1.0) were discussed. The raw minutes can be found here, with links to slides from Cisco and Microsoft. In this post we are giving highlights of 3 features discussed:

  • Background PeerConnection processing
  • Supporting new “types” of video
  • Improved network handling

 

 Impact on my application

No short term impact as these are features for the version following WebRTC 1.0 although we know that some vendors don’t always wait for features to be finalized before they implement them.

 

 Standardization status

Initial planning.

 

 Details

Background PeerConnection processing

Support for background peer connection processing, likely in service workers. This item was foundational for a number of the other requests such as:

  • Keeping a connection alive even when the user is not directly engaging in the current tab
  • Being ready to accept calls on short notice without requiring an open browser tab
  • Interacting with IoT ‘things’ that may only need a simple data channel, for example, where there is no need for audio and video at all

Supporting new “types” of video

Giving more extensive control over more kinds of video

  • Spherical video, stereo video
  • Augmented reality
  • Multicast, simulcast, and pluggable codecs
  • Far-end camera control

Improved network handling

  • Better network interface handoff without call drop, e.g. mobile to WiFi and vice versa
  • Support for QUIC for faster overall setup
  • Fuller support for ICE, and support for the improved version of ICE being developed at the IETF.  This may even allow ICE to be implemented via a JS library
  • Perhaps a world where SDP is not needed (but not necessarily the ORTC solution)