More and more application developers have come to rely on platform-as-a-service providers for building and scaling software.
WebRTC's complexity makes it ripe for this kind of approach, so it's no surprise that so many early WebRTC companies have been platform service providers. Unfortunately for customers, the nascent Rent-Your-WebRTC-Solution market has proven pretty unstable.
News came yesterday that yet another provider of WebRTC hosted services—in this case, Requestec—has been acquired. We've seen this movie before with Snapchat's acquisition of AddLive and we'll probably see it again, maybe multiple times.
At &yet, we've been working steadily at creating open source software and approaches to infrastructure to help our clients avoid the volatile WebRTC rental market.
We believe we can help use and create common standards while working collaboratively with a coalition of developers who want to push WebRTC forward in an open way.
We're pretty old school. We believe that's the way the best parts of the web have always been, and if it's up to us, that's the way the web—including WebRTC—will always be.
As with any software, yes, you could build your entire platform yourself—from frontend to backend, from clean-coded clients to sustainable ops, including scalable and secure signaling, NAT traversal, and media servers. But it's awfully expensive and time-consuming to do that, even if you can find folks who have strong competence in this field. (And we can vouch that it's not a trivial undertaking, because we've spent a year and a half doing it!)
So you could rent, you could build your own, or you could work with a technology team that has the following qualities:
- They're experts on all aspects of WebRTC
- They're veterans with many other realtime technologies
- They produce code libraries that are extremely easy to build upon
- They're dev-friendly, ops-knowledgeable, and totally approachable
- They're dedicated to teaching and open-sourcing everything they know
- They're even willing and able to help you run the platform yourself
- They're completely independent and bootstrapped so they'll never sell the company—period
Sounds like one of those gauzy dream sequences in a cheesy movie–the kind that's shown right before someone gets hit with a large dose of cold, hard reality.
But this movie has a happy ending, because at &yet we're just that kind of team.
Want to write your own story when it comes to WebRTC?
We encourage you to embrace the open platform that is Otalk, check out our WebRTC consulting services, and drop us a line to start a conversation.