Open Media Web

The Web Real-Time Communications Working Group published the first public Working Draft of WebRTC 1.0: Real-Time Communications Between Browsers yesterday. This publication marks the first milestone to enable audio/video conferencing on the Web.

This work is a joint effort between the W3C WebRTC working group, responsible for the API, and the IETF RTCWEB group, responsible for the protocols. The API described in this first public working draft is incomplete — description of the data channel is missing for instance — and subject to major changes based on the outcome of the (quite lively!) ongoing discussions in both groups.

The W3C WebRTC Working Group will hold its second face-to-face meeting next week during W3C TPAC in Santa Clara, USA. It expects to make progress on privacy and security issues, as well as on finding the right balance between a low-level approach (that would enable interested parties to tweak potentially complex system parameters) and a higher-level API (that Web developers could use without a priori technical knowledge about real-time communications).

The design of the API is based on WebRTC use cases and requirements. We’d like to encourage you to review this document and the first draft of the WebRTC API and to provide feedback to the group on the public-webrtc@w3.org mailing-list (with public archives).