December 2013

WebRTC
• getUserMedia() permissions will be sticky for HTTPS on Android from M33
• public-webrtc thread: screensharing will only be available from (Chrome) apps:

Screensharing is more dangerous than webcam access, because the attacker can record the screen, AND control what is displayed on it. It only takes one frame to capture sensitive information – far less than would be noticeable by a user. Requiring unambiguous opt-in for sharing, and being able to remotely disable bad actors, are therefore the best hope of security. To opt in, the user will need to install an app or extension, and when actually sharing, select the window/desktop to be shared from a consent box. Installing through an app store is an explicit grant of trust by the user to the application (similar to installing a desktop app). Visiting a web page is not.

• Are Facebook VoIP calls on Android Using WebRTC?
• Messaging with XMPP over WebSocket
• 87 Percent of Telecom Leaders Factor WebRTC into Product Roadmaps
• P2PXHR from Peer5 (who built sharefest.me): same interface as XHR but optionally attempts to get assets from peers before making normal XHR request
• The Evolving WebRTC Ecosystem
• Yahoo acquires PeerCDN

Media

• Add a resize event to video element for when the video changes dimensions: html5.org/r/8347

• Intent to Implement: Audio and video tracks
• Intent to Implement (shot down – see later comments): TTML, an XML format for captions and subtitles
• JavaScript HLS converter/player: github.com/RReverser/mpegts
• Cullen Jennings explanation of H.264 and IPR
• Daala video compression project

Web Audio

• Web MIDI now implemented for Windows in Chrome 33.

And finally...

• Intent to Implement: Improved NetInfo API

• Tab indicators
• W3C Highlights 2013:

'In the past year video-watching on mobile devices has doubled. This year in the US, the average time spent with digital media per day will surpass TV viewing. Viewing is no longer a passive act. In the US, 87% of entertainment consumers say they use at least one second-screen device while watching television. The increasingly social nature of viewing content is also driving commerce; television is a major catalyst for search. No surprise, then, that the television industry would look to lower costs of video distribution to the largest number of devices. HTML5 video is widely supported and new capabilities are on the way.'

• Netflix Declares Binge Watching is the New Normal

November 2013

WebRTC
• New gUM draft with some significant changes:
• Added output device enumeration to GetSources()
• Introduced the Constrainable interface
• Removed createObjectURL
• getMediaDevices()
• Cisco is open-sourcing their H.264 implementation:

• openh264.org
• Mozilla announcement
• Monty Montgomery
• Brendan Eich
• Hacker News
• Engadget
• GigaOM

• Citrix's first commercial WebRTC app Hutt
• Lots of discussion of using tracks instead of streams
• Make MediaStreams work with postMessage()?:
w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=22366
• WebRTC forecast

Web Audio

• SoundTrap collaborative music platform
• Audio Synthesis in JavaScript

And finally...
• !media: the internet via SMS
• Netflix ditches WebKit
• ft.com analysis of Time Warner: 'The monument to the worst merger in corporate history can be found at Columbus Circle in Manhattan'
• Online video in China:

• 'TV is useless now; fortunately, we still have computers'
– fengkuangdeshiziMisselva on Weibo
• 450m viewers online, 700m by 2016
• Lots of online shows get lots of viewers, e.g. Youku comedy 'Surprise' 260m
• 30% in Beijing watch TV, down from 70% in 2009
• TV highly regulated, online video less so
• Online video companies spending $164m this year making their own shows
• But… few firms profitable
• 'This year the number of people watching online video on their mobile devices has surged. Analysts expect the arrival of fourth-generation mobile networks to accelerate this trend. People who watch shows on mobile devices spend more time viewing, overall, than those on desktop PCs ...'

• OTT messaging:

• 40 billion messages in 2013, double SMS
• Platforms for media and web apps: not just about communication
• Line in Japan made $132m in Q2 from virtual stickers!
• WeChat, based in China, budgeted $200m for overseas marketing this year

October 2013

WebRTC

• Proposal: VP8 as RTCWEB Mandatory to Implement
• First WebRTC Facebook app, built using vLine
• Together.js: Mozilla JavaScript library to add collaboration to apps, uses WebRTC for audio chat, WebSocket for data sharing
• Media Capture and Streams: new editor's draft, Constrainable interface in next version
• GeckoView will support WebRTC
• uProxy announced (Chrome extension using WebRTC data channels to circumvent censorship/firewalls):

• uproxy.org
• youtu.be/ZJ6BuHL0EiQ
• mashable.com/2013/10/21/google-uproxy-internet-freedom
(Worth noting that quite a lot of commentary implies that uProxy will be used for snooping: 'More like a peer-to-peer gateway to the NSA.', etc.)

• SCTP data channels in Chrome 31 without a flag, which enables:

• Optional reliable transfer, e.g. for file sharing (though in fact this has been accomplished over RTP, the old protocol for RTCDataChannel, which in practice is actually pretty reliable)
• Binary data
• Built-in flow control (flow/congestion control is built into SCTP, and bandwidth is managed not capped)

• First live TV interview using WebRTC
• Vonage and WebRTC:

'We use iSAC and iLBC as our audio codecs and VP8 as our video codec to ensure the best quality on mobile devices while reducing transcoding on the backend. … We would love to see where WebRTC goes with mobile and integrate better with mobile devices. For instance, using the hardware implementation of the codecs that is available in the devices’ chipsets to provide higher quality media.'

EME
• Mozilla bug: request for pledge never to implement HTML5 DRM
• Brendan Eich blog post about EME
• Henri Sivonen: What is EME?
• NPAPI deprecation blog post: Silverlight, used by 15% of Chrome users, will be whitelisted, probably until NPAPI is removed (planned for Q4 2014)
• Tim Berners-Lee signs off on EME (EFF comment)

Media
• srcN Intent to Implement (13 October, arguments against):

<img src-1="(max-width: 400px) pic-small.jpg" src-2="(max-width: 1000px) pic-medium.jpg" src="pic-large.jpg">

• Discussion of enabling video for img elements, in Animated WebP Images: Intent to Ship
• WebVTT regions Intent to Implement (9 October)
• Mozilla Lossy Compressed Image Formats Study:

The data shows HEVC-MSP performing significantly better than JPEG and the other formats we tested. WebP and JPEG XR perform better than JPEG according to some quality scoring algorithms, but similarly or worse according to others.

• Snap.svg: The JavaScript SVG Library for the Modern Web
• The 10.8.5 camera driver for the recent version of the MacBook Air is 64-bit only, so any 32-bit app using the camera fails – including Skype, iMovie, Hangouts (and any app running on Chrome that uses getUserMedia()). Apple is fixing this.

Web Audio
• Questioning the current direction of the Web Audio API

And finally...
• Peer5 Kaltura P2P video
• Kindle Mayday: 24/7 customer support with video chat and screensharing. (Kindle HDX range includes 8.9" tablet with 2.2GHz quad-core, 339ppi display, rear-facing 8MP 1080p and front-facing 720p camera, 374g.)
• Wearable, speaking depth sensing camera for blind people: distance, colour and 'person-sensing'
• Stereoscopic 3D with CSS: just cross your eyes!
• Some people love image stabilisation but not everyone
• Radio is still the world's most popular form of media with listener figures at their highest levels in decades:

What irritates many people in the broadcast industry is a conviction that Apple, Pandora and other algorithm-driven music services are being misleading in their use of the word “radio”. 

“They’ve stolen our brand,” says James Cridland, a veteran of the UK radio industry who has helped the BBC and several commercial broadcasters develop their digital strategies. “A list of songs produced by a computer program is not radio,” he says, articulating a widely-held view. “Radio is something that gives you companionship, it surprises you, it gives you news.”

September 2013

WebRTC
• New draft of the WebRTC API has been published as TR Working Draft: w3.org/TR/webrtc
• Hardware decoding for WebRTC enabled on Chrome OS
• WebRTC for Web Devs event at SFHTML5
• 14 Google Developer Groups in 10 countries are running the WebRTC codelab from this week
• Firefox 24 on Android and desktop: WebRTC enabled by default

• Sharing files with RTCDataChannel

• Idea for WebRTC social networks

EME

• Intent to Ship on Android, 20 August: Encrypted Media Extension (EME) API with Widevine content decryption module (CDM) in Chrome for Android, to be launched in M31.
• Intent to Ship on Android, 20 August: same, but with ClearKey decryption, launched in M30.
VP9

Web Speech
• Speech recognition on Android: Intent to Ship

Web Audio

• Boris Smus's Sonic Socket

Media
• New Editor's Draft of MediaStream Image Capture API:

• getFrame() creates an ImageData object available in onframegrab handler
• takePhoto() creates a Blob available in onphoto handler

And finally...
• The Qt framework (for building cross-platform/device native and embedded apps, now owned by Digia) is moving from Qt WebKit to Qt WebEngine, based on Chromium: 'Multimedia and new HTML5 features such as WebRTC are working out-of the-box ....'
• Extracting a 3D object from a photograph
• Sony Smart Stick: $150 Android, plugs into TV MHL socket (no need for separate cable)
• Comments on NSA and encryption
• joinaspot.com: WebRTC video conference app with Chrome extension for notifications

• Streaming media is now profitable: 

The Recording Industry Association of America calculates that revenues from services including Spotify, Pandora and YouTube went from 3 per cent of industry revenues in 2007 to 15 per cent, or more than $1bn, in 2012. … What is lost from many calculations is the fact that the urge to own may be weaker in the age of streaming, but so is the urge to steal. Traffic to peer-to-peer file-sharing and torrent sites is declining where legal alternatives are offered. Netflix’s Ted Sarandos said in May: 'When we launch in a territory, the BitTorrent traffic drops as the Netflix traffic grows.'

• Scalable Video Coding deal with Vidyo
• Skype 3D
• VP8 HD hangouts
• 10bn Shazam tags (>100m per week, 54% from TV)
• IETF call for all web traffic to encrypted as a defence against mass surveillance

• HDMI 2.0: 18Gbps bandwidth, 60fps 4K, 32 channel audio, same connector and cable

• MPEG-DASH at the BBC:

The media is encoded a number of times at different bitrates. Each encoding is called a Representation. These are split into a number of Media Segments. The client plays a programme by requesting segments, in order, from a representation over HTTP. Representations can be grouped into Adaptation Sets of representations containing equivalent content. If the client wishes to change bitrate it can pick an alternative from the current adaption set and start requesting segments from that representation. Content is encoded in such a way to make this switching easy for the client to do. In addition to a number of media segments, a representation generally also has an Initialisation Segment. This can be thought of as a header, containing information about the encoding, frame sizes, etc. A client needs to obtain this for a given representation before consuming media segments from that representation.

Finally, there is also a Media Presentation Description (MPD), commonly referred to as the manifest. This documents the Adaptation Sets and Representations, together with durations and URLs.

August 2013

WebRTC
• Firefox Beta for Android supports WebRTC
• Is WebRTC ready yet?
• HTML5 Rocks article updated, excellent Mozilla articles
• MediaStream.getSources() enables camera and microphone selection: demo
...and there is a proposal to select audio or video output device:

navigator.getMediaSinks(callback)
HTMLMediaElement.sinkId

• IETF 87 unanimously agreed the Unified Plan: extensions to SDP, the format used for exchanging metadata in WebRTC – crucial for enabling WebRTC to cope with large numbers of 'media flows', i.e. sessions with lots of participants 

• Lots of new WebRTC telehealth projects: remote consultation, document sharing and remote monitoring: Healthdirect, Ondello… 

EME

• github.com/eme

Media

• Intent to Implement MSE on Android
• Alpha transparency in Canary: demo
• MediaRecorder API:

• Firefox Nightly implementation, audio only as yet: demo
• Chrome Intent to Implement

• Discussion of using Streams API
• In-band WebVTT:

• Just like <track> but data is embedded in .webm file
• Currently MSE only, non-MSE in progress (i.e. <video src='foo.webm'>)
• Currently requires --enable-inband-text-tracks

• Microsoft Open Tech MPEG-DASH library: dash.js
• Web Speech demos (both work in Canary): recognition, synthesis

And finally...
• Tipping point for media viewing as couch potatoes go digital: US adults now spend more hours consuming digital media than TV – average five hours nine minutes online per day, TV four hours 31 minutes; mobile web two hours 21 minutes per day
• BBC R&D In Session: broadcast is moving to the internet, slowly
• Google Research computer vision project: ‘A flash of red bobbing along the ground might be a child’s toy in the context of a playground or a rooster in the context of a farmyard’
• Old post on Gigaom: study showing people give up on video that doesn't load quickly (!)
• Mail Online news site records 134m users in July, 10.6m in one day