The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) have announced that Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC) is now an official web standard enabling audio and video communication anywhere on the web. While it has only just become a standard, it has been supported by popular web browsers for years.
On the technical level, WebRTC is a framework that allows developers to add peer-to-peer audio and video chat to their projects. If you’ve ever used Facebook Messenger, Discord or a plethora of other services to make a video or audio call, then you’ve used WebRTC.
Commenting on today’s news, IETF Chair Alissa Cooper said:
“Voice and video over IP revolutionized the way that people communicate around the world. Integrating these technologies into the Web platform has dramatically expanded their reach. Thanks to close collaboration between the IETF and W3C to standardize these technologies. WebRTC has enabled billions of people to connect and engage with each other during the COVID-19 pandemic, regardless of device or geography.”
By standardising the WebRTC technology, any software projects that want to implement the feature in future will have a clear set of guidelines they can follow to ensure that their software’s WebRTC implementation has been done correctly and meets all of the requirements.