When we decided on the topic of this webinar – Realizing FaceTime on Android Devices – and announced it on TMCnet, a promotional email went out. Within a day I received an email from a colleague of mine saying that when he saw the webinar’s title he immediately thought that this is a webinar that I should be giving – only to find out that I am actually giving it. For some unknown reason, I have been marked as RADVISION’s resident Fandroid.
If I am a Fandroid or not is a topic for another post. What I wanted to share in this post is a bit of the dynamics of the webinar that I hosted this week along with Amit Lavi, who is a Product Manager here at RADVISION.
When we had to select the poll questions for the webinar, we debated if we should ask “what should developers take care of the most in their application”, and give 3 distinct options:
- The technical spec (what is the resolution and frame rate of the video)
- The quality of the media (working over unmanaged networks
- The user interface (how clean and smooth the GUI is)
Some at RADVISION said that the obvious answer that people will lean into was the user interface, so what’s the point if most of our spiel in this webinar was on the quality of the media and the smooth integration into the Android OS. While I didn’t believe the result would be that most people would select the user interface answer, I did suspect it will get a large number of the votes.
The result?
So either people were polite or there is a realization on the market today that the most challenging part of video calling clients is the media quality – not the codec’s specification itself and not the GUI that sits on top. This is good news, as it shows the maturity of the industry and the need for some real and effective solutions instead of gimmicky ones.
If you missed the webinar, you can find the slides presented here:
Realizing FaceTime on Android Devices: Webinar slides
If this topic interests you, you might just want to head over to TMCnet’s site and register to see our Android-FaceTime webinar.
I’d love to hear your thought: What do you view as the most challenging part of developing a video client? Just write a comment below.
