Announcing WebRTC Beta for Red5 Pro This has been a long time in the making. Ever since we first ever engineered RTMP and created Red5 back in 2005, we’ve been focused on providing low latency streaming solutions for developers looking to build the next big thing. Back in the day these apps were the likes… Continue reading WebRTC BETA IS HERE!
Announcing WebRTC Beta for Red5 Pro
This has been a long time in the making. Ever since we first ever engineered RTMP and created Red5 back in 2005, we’ve been focused on providing low latency streaming solutions for developers looking to build the next big thing. Back in the day these apps were the likes of Justin TV and (cringe) Chat Roulette, viral apps which were built on top of Flash. The latest phase of low latency live streaming is now with apps like Periscope and BEAM, and this phase is in its infancy. The current trend is focused on mobile, but the next phase will be more around IoT, wearables, and immersive virtual reality experiences. We don’t want to wait around to see what’s next; we want to fuel this development, and with our beta release of WebRTC for Red5 Pro, we are one step closer to the next live streaming revolution.
As with anything revolutionary, it won’t be super easy, and there are plenty of players in the space who are resting on their laurels. It’s baffling to us to see that most of the major streaming providers like CDNs have moved to HTTP based protocols, which by their very nature introduce a tremendous amount of latency. Why do they do this? Because it’s easy to scale. Even our main competitor, Wowza suggests to their users that in order to scale you need to use HLS. We think that’s nonsense. Why? Because latency kills interactivity. We believe the future of live streaming is interactivity: giving users the ability to chat amongst each other, add in a live video caller, and/or make suggestions during live game play.
Because of this we’ve designed our platform to autoscale on top of existing cloud providers. Now, for the first time, we are opening Red5 Pro to HTML5 developers who want this kind of interactivity in the browser.
This beta release consists of a server-side implementation which acts as a WebRTC peer, transcoding streams to all of our supported formats: RTMP, RTSP, our mobile SDKs, and HLS. We’ve also built a JavaScript SDK featuring a live publisher component for accessing your camera and mic and streaming to the server peer, as well as a Player component for low latency playback.
If you are interested in gaining access, sign up with a Pro account today, and we will invite you to participate in the early beta.
We can’t wait to see what you do with this!
-Red5 Pro team