Introducing Pre-Call Test: Stand up to spotty network conditions

August 10, 2015 | By Meeta Dash | Code Sample, Connectivity, Developer, New Products & Features

As much as WiFi and cellular network reliability has improved over the years, it’s not uncommon to find yourself in a situation where connectivity drops or is spotty at best. Somehow in our overconnected world, “offline” mode still exists. When you’re using real-time communications technology, poor service or connection quality can be particularly disruptive.

That’s why we’re excited to introduce our Pre-Call Test tool – a set of tools that will determine if an end-user’s OpenTok-powered call will be successful given their network conditions. The Pre-Call Test can be integrated into your application’s workflow so that your end-users can run the diagnostic test before they even join the session. Based on their test results, you can implement business logic that determines whether a particular user is allowed to publish a stream to the session with video, audio-only mode, and more.

Introducing Inspector: Your new session diagnostic tool

July 31, 2015 | By Meeta Dash | Developer, New Products & Features, OpenTok API, Tool

Today we’re thrilled to announce the launch of our powerful new session diagnostic tool, Inspector. It provides you with a high-level OpenTok session summary at a stream and user level to help pinpoint errors, failures, and quality issues. Our main goal? To simplify your post-session debugging.

Inspector takes the rich and complex operational data that the TokBox engineering team uses to debug OpenTok sessions, and makes it available to you in an easy to use interface. These vital metrics will enable you to drill down into session-level details around:

Bit-rate, latency and packet loss graphs at user and stream level
Event Logs (Detailed list and description of all session events)
User Logs (Information such as location, SDK, browser and client)
Error Logs (Details of all errors encountered, time of error and impacted end-users)

Now your technical support team can quickly glance through session data to determine whether an issue was caused by an end-user error, application error, network problem or the OpenTok platform.

Sharing more, with Firefox Hello

June 3, 2015 | By Scott Lomond | Firefox Hello, New Products & Features, OpenTok, Partner News, WebRTC

Mozilla has released further enhancements to Firefox Hello, powered by OpenTok, including the ability to screen share within a video chat. This new feature allows participants to open and share a browser tab or application window from within the chat, making browsing, shopping, drafting or any other activity more collaborative and engaging.

Packing more punch into OpenTok

October 24, 2014 | By Melih O. | New Products & Features, The OpenTok Platform

We’re moving the OpenTok Platform to a new release cadence – less frequent with more punch. We’ve made a few significant decisions about how we’re going to release and support client updates in the OpenTok Platform, and, as these changes go live, we wanted to keep the OpenTok community properly updated.

Quarterly releases
Over the life of the OpenTok Platform, we’ve moved from weekly to bi-weekly to monthly releases. When the Platform only had web-based clients, it was possible for us and (some of) our partners to move this quickly.

Announcing the OpenTok Connectivity Doctor

July 1, 2014 | By Lauren Slattery | Connectivity, New Products & Features

As an OpenTok customer, you know that in order to deliver a great call experience, network connectivity is king. You can spend hours developing your real-time communications app, only to encounter connectivity hurdles like corporate firewalls or blocked IP in a new network environment.

It’s important to know that your application will work where you need it to, whether you’re pitching an investor, selling to a client, or just showing off all your hard work. That’s why we’re excited to launch the first version of the OpenTok Connectivity Doctor.

The OpenTok Connectivity Doctor helps you diagnose problems with your network before or after you connect to an OpenTok session. This tool does not test for errors in your code.

OpenTok 2.0 Archiving API into production

June 23, 2014 | By Eleanor Hermon | Archiving, Developer, New Products & Features

Hot off the heels of our OpenTok 2.0 Archiving API pricing and storage announcement we’re excited to announce that our Archiving API has now gone into production.

You can find out more about the features of this API in our previous post or by taking a look at our docs page and here is a quick summary just in case.

OpenTok iOS and Android SDKs 2.2 into production

June 17, 2014 | By Eleanor Hermon | Android SDK, Developer, iOS SDK, New Products & Features

Following on from our OpenTok archiving and storage announcement we’re excited to fill you in on some updates we are making to our OpenTok iOS and Android SDKs 2.2 that are going into production. What started out as internal engineering project has paved the way to the release of a suite of valuable mobile features which have become a formal part of the product offering, setting OpenTok further apart from other WebRTC platforms.

Deep dive into the ‘Video Driver’

June 17, 2014 | By charley | Android SDK, Developer, iOS SDK, New Products & Features

OpenTok Mobile SDKs, Revision 2: The Video Driver

In the latest versions of the OpenTok SDKs for iOS and Android, everything is new. We found an opportunity to learn from the lessons of the past two years, and seized it to conduct an overhaul of the architecture of the client. The 2.2.0 release of the iOS and Android SDKs marks the second major revision of the implementation of the OpenTok Mobile SDKs. This post highlights one of the many new features of the 2.2.0 SDKs, about which we are feeling particularly excited: the “Video Driver”. Although the feature exists with parity in both platforms, today we’ll focus on the iOS-variant of the new API.

OpenTok 2.0 Archiving API pricing and storage announcement

June 3, 2014 | By Eleanor Hermon | Archiving, Developer, New Products & Features

Here at TokBox we are always trying to expand and improve our range of features, tailoring these features in line with real world developer needs. That’s why we are excited to announce some pricing and storage updates.

We’re still receiving a lot of feedback on our beta so we’d like to extend a big ‘thank you’ to our community for this.

Introducing our new codec: AF14

April 1, 2014 | By Ankur Oberoi | Developer, New Products & Features, OpenTok API, OpenTok on WebRTC

While WebRTC has been innovating at an impressively rapid rate, the users of the web and mobile apps have been delighted with lots of new experiences. We’ve started connecting to people across different timezones, countries, and even continents in real time, on just about every sort of device. But when we ask developers, the people who dream up the next wave of crazy ideas, what they need in order to keep delighting their users we hear a few things over and over.

One of the most requested features of the platform that developers are patiently waiting for is WebRTC broadcasts at scale. The technical challenge is about getting the right stream (with the right bitrate, and the right encoding) out to all the different types of people who are watching, with their vastly different networks and bandwidth capabilities.