After Tokbox closed its own-brand consumer video chat service in 2011, it began opening up its own technology to offer as a platform for rival services. Two years on, CEO Ian Small is thanking a Google-backed web video initiative for supporting his company.
“A little over a year ago, Chrome introduced WebRTC,” Small tells Beet.TV. “We’ve gone from virtual no endpoints sprouting WebRTC on the planet to now over a billion. It’s the fastest-growing communications standard in the history of communications.”
WebRTC is what San Francisco-based Tokbox, through its OpenTok technology, deploys through APIs to let customers enable live video chat on their sites. Small says customer services, medicine and education are use cases. Telefonica might agree – it acquired Tokbox in 2012.
“The great thing about WebRTC is it’s brought really high-quality live video and audio directly in to the browser, without needing any kind of plugin. You can start to see and talk to somebody else.”
