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What's Next for WebRTC in 2020

Learn more about streaming analytics at Streaming Media's next event.

Watch the complete presentation from Streaming Media East, VES204. Deploying WebRTC in a Low-Latency Streaming Service, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Dr. Alex Gouiallard: What about next year? Well it depends who you ask. If you ask Google, they made it very, very clear, AV1, QUIC and Web Assembly . So the role of LAPI in the new WebRTC will allow people to bring their own codec in JavaScript right or in whatever language. And fortunately JavaScript is not fast enough and that's where WASM is coming in to actually have some pure web-based encryption and encoding. And so on, then, you do not depend on the browser implementation, you're not constrained by which codec they support there, you're only constrained by the CPU and the capacity of WASM. QUIC is super super hot, I'm not even going to go there, and AV1 is a new codec, we spoke a little bit about that, obviously for them you can read the subtitle here, Stadia, right. I want a better compression with a better resilience to network, bad quality on a transport that is faster to make an establishment and that can multiplex a lot of things, data and so on.

One fantastic use-case for QUIC is that you can have perfect synchronization between the data and the video frame, which you cannot do today with a data-channel in WebRTC. That means, AR, right. For AR you need to have the data that is exactly synchronized with the frame and today it's not exactly that. So even if you look at all the Facebook and all the other AI or VR stuff, you'll see it slagging a little bit when you move and that's because the data channel and the media is not synchronized. With QUIC you're gonna be able to have both on the same transport with the same timestamp, so it's going to be synchronized by design.

According to Facebook, it's QUIC, QUIC, and QUIC only. And actually I could put Akamai here. Akamai is like, I want to worry about TC, I'm going to jump directly on QUIC and I'm going to do media over QUIC and it's going to be awesome, I don't know if it's gonna work but it's going to be awesome. So Facebook open-sourced their stack last week. Fantastic implementation, very high-level they're using in production, the code is clean. So far there were 13, 12, 13 implementations of QUIC. They were more or less academic or for people working on the standard itself.

They have been using that in production for a year so they actually not only provide a QUIC stack they also provide the server for load-balancing and so on and so the entire thing, it's beautiful. So if you want to learn about QUIC, don't read the spec, go directly on the GitHub, it's really good. According to AOMedia, Intel and Netflix, it's AV1, right. So there is a little bit of strategy there. The reason why Netflix and Intel made their announcement about real-time implementation of an AV1 encoder is also because they're trying to position themself for AV2.

Right, so they want to be replace the libaom, which is the official implementation that the AOMedia members use by the SVT-AV1 implementation by Intel and Netflix. And that will provide them a little bit more leverage in the discussion and the political thing going inside AOMedia. But it's a good codec if you're not looking for real-time. If you're looking for video on demand streaming, it's really good and it works super fast even on a normal Dell off-the-shelf hardware.

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