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.
“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.
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%.
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.
Early 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:
Today 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.
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).
In 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.
Last week we launched our new Interactive Broadcast Solution and we’re delighted to announce our first partner to build on the platform – Fox Sports. Fox have built the Fox Sports Huddle – a weekly interactive online broadcast where college football fans, players, managers and experts can come face to face on www.foxsports.com, one of the biggest sports websites in the world.
College Football is one of the most popular sports in America, and now Fox Sports Huddle brings fans even closer to the action, taking sports coverage from a simple one way stream or text chat to a large scale, interactive and engaging experience where fans can truly be part of the show. Fox Sports Huddle incorporates live feeds from the studio or the sports field together with real-time video streams from fans to create an online video talk show that can be broadcast to an online audience of up to thousands of people, all without a download or plugin. Now, Fox Sports experts and athletes can talk with their fans, not at them.
One of the fun things about running a communications platform company is watching new use cases emerge as companies and developers innovate using our technologies.
Several months ago, we began to notice a new trending mode of use of WebRTC in the area of Field Service enablement. I’ve also heard people describe it as remote workforce applications, or even fleet management systems.
The key concept is that a field worker – someone who goes onsite to a customer location to effect a repair, make an inspection, or deliver or pick up products, uses some sort of a computer or electronic device as an essential tool for that onsite visit. Increasingly these devices are smartphones or tablets.
It’s predicted that by 2018, 70% of mobile workers will use a tablet or a hybrid device that has tablet-like characteristics. (Source: RapidValue Solutions)
