Introducing the Interactive Broadcast Solution

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TokBox's Interactive Broadcast SolutionOver the last 5 years, we’ve helped hundreds of companies create rich and engaging applications with OpenTok powered live video and voice. Now, we’re bringing broadcasters and brands (who are now broadcasters too) unprecedented audience engagement with the launch of our new Interactive Broadcast Solution.

Until now live broadcasting applications have focused on one-way streaming. This works well for conferences or events. But now, Interactive Broadcast is the first solution to enable multi-­party panels, video-based audience participation, and an on-brand experience for website and application owners. The Interactive Broadcast Solution gives broadcasters the tools they need to bring user-generated content and viewer-participation content to both online and TV audiences.

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When a Chrome update breaks your WebRTC application

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chrome logoEarly December saw the roll-out of Chrome 47. When doing anything with WebRTC, this is always an interesting time. A release brings new features or may break things, like removing the getUserMedia functionality for insecure origins.

Our metrics clearly track such roll outs as seen below:

# of OpenTok calls

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Introducing the OpenTok Apple TV OS SDK (beta)

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AppleMockUpToday we’re excited to introduce the first WebRTC SDK for the AppleTV to support the next generation of endpoints – the television.

The rise of mobile, open sourced software and social networks has democratized content in every field from journalism to photography and video production. However, the last remaining battleground is the television, and Apple, with the new Apple TV, is blurring the lines between online and television, opening up all new possibilities for content creation and engagement. This marks not just another endpoint supported by TokBox, but the start of a new era of content creation that happens in the living room, which is why we’re prioritizing TV together with the web and mobile.

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Demo App: Building with the Pre-Call API

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// < ![CDATA[ _
// ]]>GUEST POST: WebRTC.ventures is a custom design & development agency focused on building WebRTC applications. They are part of AgilityFeat, which is one of our development partners at TokBox. Jean Lescure from their team wanted to share their experiences using our new API for detecting call quality.

DemoBack in August TokBox announced their new Pre-Call API, for testing out bandwidth conditions, and posted a repository on github with a proof of concept. At WebRTC.ventures we saw a great opportunity to build upon that project and got working on creating a demo app out of it, including a server implementation in NodeJS which is compatible with Heroku.

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TechTok catch up – WebRTC codec wars: rebooted

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techtoksAt our September TechTok WebRTC consultant and analyst, Tsahi Levent-Levi, came along to discuss the power plays of the video coding industry.

Just when we thought we were done with the video codec wars in WebRTC – we found out we’re only just beginning.  Tsahi was here to talk us through some important questions – how is this WebRTC codec war going to play out? Where do the alliances lie?  And where are we headed?

Watch the full video here:

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Introducing the Annotation Widget in Beta

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Icon_set-Annotation-121115Embedded communications is so powerful because of one very important factor – context. Whether that’s a web page, presentation, LMS, medical scan, (the list goes on), context enhances the conversation. Better still? When collaboration features are layered on top.

Using the OpenTok platform, our aim is to make it super simple for you to add rich collaboration functionality to your apps. Today we’re happy to introduce the Annotation widget for the OpenTok platform in beta –  a pre-built UI component that can be quickly added to your application. The widget adds annotation and frame grab capabilities to the OpenTok web, iOS and Android SDKs and is  completely customizable.

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The impact of Google’s new Chrome security policy on WebRTC

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webrtc_logo

UPDATE 9/16/15: After we published this post Google announced that they are pushing back the release date of the HTTPS security change. They’re estimating that it will now be released to production in December 2015. 

Google recently announced a security policy change that will impact future versions of the Chrome browser. Any website which has integrated geolocation technology, screen-sharing, WebRTC and more, will now be required to be served from a secure (HTTPS) site.

We at TokBox are supportive of this update as we believe operating your WebRTC-based applications through HTTPS is a best practice and offers enhanced security. In addition, it has the added bonus of improving your end-user experience by remembering their hardware settings, and even allowing screen-sharing (if you choose to implement it).

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White paper: Beyond E-health – Embedded Communications in Healthcare

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BeyondE-healthIn recent years, the shift in behavior towards digital, on-demand services together with the massive increase in demand for healthcare has created an unprecedented challenge for the healthcare industry.  Providers have been forced to reinvent their existing care models, offering more of their services online.

In line with this, consumers are increasingly turning towards on demand healthcare services that they can access online, whenever and wherever they need them.  In fact it has been estimated that by 2020, over 78 million consumers will use home health technologies.  This is a dramatic increase from 14 million in 2014.

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TechTok: Designing Your Data Warehouse

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periscopeYour data warehouse is the core of your analytics setup. Whether you’re collecting events or ETLing from a prod replica, your warehouse needs to be organized to make analysis queries fast and easy.

Fast data analysis requires using the right schema design for your data and taking advantage of the performance features in modern data warehouses like Redshift.

Join us at this month’s TechTok, where Tom O’Neill from Periscope Data will discuss how Redshift uses distributed data and columnar storage to speed up query execution, as well as how to leverage these optimizations in your schema design. You can find out more about the event and register to attend here.

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TechTok catch up – Designing Your Data Warehouse

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techtoksAt November’s TechTok, Tom O’Neill, CTO of Periscope Data , gave us some ideas about how to design data warehouses.  Tom focused on how Redshift uses distributed data and columnar storage to speed up query execution, as well as how to leverage these optimizations in your schema design.

Watch the full video here:

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