In the last few years it felt like we were stuck in the rumor mill of changes. Wondering, "will they or won't they," when it came to emerging technologies.
2017 seems to have been the year that the video world put it's foot down on some lasting decisions.
Out of the many changes that took place over the year, here are our top 3 picks:
- An end of an era comes with Adobe announcing they will entirely kill off Flash by 2020. Major companies like Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google will all phase out Flash over the next few years, favoring the widely implemented HTML5 format instead.
- The video codec war continues to rage as Safari supports H.264 but announces a move to HEVC. YouTube drops it in favour of V9, and the Alliance for Open Media adds Facebook to it's ranks in support of open, royalty free, video codec technology.
- Launches and acquisitions galore: Amazon get's in the game with Chime, Slack implements audio and video calling; so does Facebook, Atlassian purchases Jitsi media server, and Twilio acquires parts of the Kurento team.
It's clear that the playing field for widespread transformation was set in 2017. Telehealth adoption is set to double in 2018, remote work and collaboration will become more common place, and mobile usage will continue to grow as users ditch their laptops and PC’s in for tablets and phones.
But what will bring true paradigm shifting changes in 2018 in our opinion, are the following:
- WebRTC adoption will the name of the game as all major browsers now support the protocol. For video conferencing this means no more annoying downloads, HD quality in-browser video, and stutter free multi-stream video for organization large and small. Prepare for WebRTC to be the ubiquitous choice for video.
- Live streaming continues to grow, accounting for 75% of all internet traffic in 2017. Every major major platform doubling down by improving their feed quality and adding cross compatibility. We think that this growth will not only continue in the social media, but also in enterprise companies, where event webinars and team collaboration via video will be more efficient than ever.
- API technologies will continue to expand, making room for emerging VR and AR technologies, as well as deeper integration with a variety of business tools. 2018 will be the year that video conferencing fully ingrains itself as part of a full Unified Communications plan.
As always, Digital Samba is an active participant and proponent of the cutting edge. But our focus will always be on our biggest goal - your complete satisfaction. To that end, we're hard at work on our own WebRTC upgrade to our webinar software. In 2019, maybe we'll be one of those paradigm shifting companies!
