It's hard not to love a winner, and in AddLive's case, that makes it particularly difficult not to love it. It took the award for Best WebRTC Tool at the WebRTC Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, as well as a judges' choice designation after the first day of demos, and showed off a demo that shows the company has been putting a lot of work into Web-based real-time communications (WebRTC) from a long way back...even before the term “WebRTC” was even coined.
AddLive's product allows for an RTC stack to be delivered to the user based on C / C++. It's capable of both uplinking and downlinking, and can even adjust to the parameters of the connect from which it currently operates. With fatter pipes available, it offers better quality picture and sound, but can also dial these back accordingly when the bandwidth is a little more limited. It's a cloud-based service that offers up support for several different platforms, including some that will surprise users. Firewall traversal and proxy support were also in play as part of the service. An admin dashboard, meanwhile, provides vital statistics like usage summaries and total minutes spent in a month.
The biggest selling points about the AddLive demo was in showing off a product that not only worked well with WebRTC-capable browsers, but also those browsers that didn't work well with such technology, as well as with perhaps less expected—but very important—platforms like the two major mobile device platforms (iOS and Android) as well as Google Glass. AddLive looked to focus on the delivery of audio and video—as opposed to things like file sharing—because it was a major “problem space,” as the company describes it. The demonstration, meanwhile, showed a series of perspectives in a central meeting room, the exact kind of thing that conferencing users are looking for.
Better, though, was that there was no “hard limit” on the number of participants that could be in play at any given time. Indeed, AddLive had some impressive numbers along with its demo, showing how it was fully deployed to over 5,000 businesses, comprising a total of around 250,000 users, through a host of applications including Doctor on Demand, Wello and Face2Face.
This is perhaps the biggest point that AddLive's platform has in its favor: It does not seem to particularly care about platform. It frankly seems to care about very little, providing connections in low bandwidth conditions, on a multiplicity of platforms, and any combination therein. Perhaps the only difference between a connection on an iPhone running on Wi-Fi and an Android on 3G is a difference in overall quality owing to available bandwidth. Even on platforms that aren't quite in a position to embrace WebRTC just yet, AddLive can carry on with the addition of a small plug-in. Of course, true WebRTC isn't supposed to use plugins at all, but in this case, an exception really can be made for those platforms that are less accommodating.
AddLive has an exciting new product to its credit, and it explains quite clearly why AddLive has landed accolades already. It's already a part of several major systems, and before it's all said and done, will likely be a part of many more to come. Its versatility, its capability, and more all add up to make it a force to be reckoned with.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
