Tag Archives: Industry News

Participatory Broadcasting: From Social to Mobile to TV

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On AirWhy traditional broadcasters need to adapt, fast

Cable companies and television networks can’t take a trick at the moment. As if digital disruption and cord cutting wasn’t making life tough enough, now comes the rise of participatory broadcasting, the phenomena where viewers collaboratively interact while consuming content, and maybe even participate.

Still coming to grips with on demand and online/mobile viewing, traditional broadcasters must now find a way to provide immersive and engaging viewer experiences to compete with the likes of Facebook Live, Meerkat and Periscope.

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Why WebRTC Will Drive the Next Billion Dollar Company

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We all have a fascination with the billion dollar startups. Venture Capitalists try and identify them early, media laud them (or bring them down to earth), and early adopters claim discovery. One new technology innovation has the potential to spark the creation of more billion dollar companies, and markets are starting to pay attention. So what is WebRTC, and why is there so much interest?

It begins with recognizing the emergence of two massive trends. The first is the increasing appetite for ‘on demand’. This is evident in everything from movies to car rides, hotels, relationships to groceries to well, everything. And communications is a core part of this, just look at Meerkat and Twitter’s latest acquisition, Periscope, bringing

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WebRTC on the TV: How content producers are turning the audience into even more content

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Lately, we have been thinking and talking about broadcast in multimedia. By now, you might have seen that TokBox is powering applications that go beyond the contemporary one-to-one and small group settings that are typically associated with the current generation of WebRTC apps, to a much larger scale of hundreds or even thousands of people watching and participating in the conversation. At a glance, this might not sound particularly groundbreaking; video has been distributed to large audiences for years. However, a closer look is necessary: with a shift in the underlying technology, TokBox adds the option of real-time communication to the existing large-audience reach of broadcast video, to enable a whole new class of applications.

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TokBox At FinDEVr: Why You Never Need People In A Branch Again

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As behavior changes and as technology continues to transform the financial services industry, it is no surprise that bank branches are closing. Analysts suggest that the number of bank branches open in the US could be cut by within the next decade.  This is to be expected as more and more of what we do as customers is online.  According to research conducted by Accenture customers engage with their banks an average of 17 times a month, but only two of those interactions involve human contact.

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Facebook & Live Video : Broadcast Will Never Be The Same Again

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“The big decision we made was to shift a lot of our video efforts to focus on Live, because it is this emerging new format; not the kind of videos that have been online for the past five or ten years” (Mark Zuckerberg, BuzzFeed)

This week Facebook introduced a suite of new add-ons to its Live feature that allows users to live-stream video. When Facebook announces a new feature, the world usually listens, or in this case watches. In the few months since Facebook Live was launched millions of live streams have been produced and subscribed to, from celebrities to chefs to everyday users.

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A peek at the future of healthcare

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Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a huge number of  innovative organizations across many verticals  integrating real time communications into their websites, apps or devices to create new forms of communication and collaboration.  Healthcare and, more specifically, telehealth is an industry in which we have seen a considerable amount of innovation.

We know that the global Telehealth landscape is rapidly changing and will continue to experience significant growth in the next few years.  The US will be in the forefront of this shift with a projected annual growth rate of 56%.

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The Future of Retail Financial Services

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Due to evolving customer expectations when it comes to service, organizations across a range of different industries are having to change their business models in order to retain and gain customers.  One industry in particular that is learning this lesson is the financial services industry.  When it comes to banking, there is always news of branches shutting down, more users using their mobile phones for banking and technology being used to make all transactions quicker and easier.

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

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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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