WebRTC is about Peer-to-Peer

Today, Silvia gave a talk at the WebRTC Summit in Santa Clara about why WebRTC is a fundamentally different and new paradigm to the Web. It introduces the ability of distributed computing into Web browser applications.

Silvia’s talk focused on the data channel and different applications that have already emerged that make use of the peer-to-peer properties of the data channel.

Coviu’s implementation of annotations and data sharing has been implemented in a peer-to-peer manner. This makes it very responsive with minimal latency between the annotations of the users. Further, the shared content is only available to the authorised users in a call and is exchanged over securely encrypted data channels, thus providing for data security and privacy. Once the session is over, the data disappears — there are no copies on any servers.

Thus, the Coviu data sharing features demonstrate the power of peer-to-peer.

Silvia also talked about other applications that have used the same peer-to-peer paradigm for other purposes: to re-implement BitTorrent in a browser (WebTorrent) or to implement a content distribution network (CDN) for files or videos.

We enjoy pushing the boundaries of WebRTC and particularly the new peer-to-peer paradigm for the Web. Thus, we’re curious to hear from anybody who has come up with a parallel computing application for WebRTC or other innovative uses of the data channel.