Comparing video conferencing services

With so many video conferencing services available, it can be difficult to determine which is right for your enterprise. Use this chart to help decide which service meets your needs.

Video has become an integral part of an enterprise's unified communications strategy. Enterprises are increasingly deploying video conferencing services to reduce communication and travel costs, meet the communication needs of remote workers and enhance collaboration among employees.

But enterprises are looking to get more than just video calls from their conferencing services. They are looking for video conferencing services that create virtual meeting spaces to encourage true collaboration with features like document sharing, mobile integration and high definition video support. Enterprises that deploy video conferencing services to promote collaboration see benefits that range from reduced travel costs to increased productivity.

But how do you know which conferencing service is right for your enterprise? There are many video conferencing services on the market that offer a variety of advantages. Some services offer basic features like chat and document sharing, while others offer more advanced features like recording and streaming. It can be difficult for enterprises to determine which service best suits their needs. Our chart compares the features and prices of several popular video conferencing services to help you in your decision-making process.

Mozilla launches Firefox 35 with WebRTC

With this week’s rollout of Firefox 35, Mozilla is taking a bold step toward reclaiming the relevance that Firefox once commanded. Key to that effort is the organization’s move to

take a standard technology called WebRTC and add it to Firefox to let users make voice and video calls from their browser.
The new feature, announced Tuesday, is called Hello, and it’s not just Mozilla’s desire to sound friendlier. It’s the organization’s latest salvo in a war against browser obscurity.

Hello, Hello
Firefox Hello lets the user initiate person-to-person conference calls directly from the browser. Although the user initiates the call on Firefox, the recipient can use any modern browser that supports WebRTC (Real-Time Communication). WebRTC is an open standard adopted by the W3C community for use in HTML5 that allows Web sites to incorporate video and audio conferencing tools into their pages.

The user initiating the call needs to have signed up for a Firefox account, though the call itself isn’t managed by a server that keeps a directory of account holders. Instead, Hello triggers the sending of an email to the call recipient, which contains a link to a server managed by Telefónica. When the recipient clicks that link, a signal is sent back to the initiator’s Firefox browser, and the session can begin.

The call recipient finds herself on a page with a blazing Firefox logo.
As the Web transitions from a place for reading pages to a platform for running apps, browsers such as Firefox must evolve into a new kind of framework. The danger for Mozilla’s effort to raise its profile is that any software framework—like Java, AIR, .NET, or WinRT—can slip quietly behind the scenes, joining anti-malware agents and background tools that users may forget are running in the background.

As WebRTC was originally envisioned, when a Web site wanted to communicate directly with users via voice or video, it could establish two-way communications using WebRTC, by way of components like buttons embedded into pages. For this scheme to work, all the major browser manufacturers—Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Opera Software—had to come on board, and they did. That cooperation is what makes it possible for Mozilla’s Hello feature to let Firefox users dial up the users of its competitors’ browsers.

But now that WebRTC technology has proven its worth, it’s being perceived by some manufacturers as the key to making mobile devices that are not telephones competitive with smartphones. A device running the new Firefox OS, for example, could be sold by everyday retailers without the need for carrier contracts—or the “bloatware” sometimes featured on phones subsidized by carriers.

The sudden WebRTC market

For now, Hello is a way for users to exploit WebRTC conferencing without waiting for Web sites to embed it into their pages first. Assuming the Firefox user is willing to add the Hello button to her toolbar (it must be done manually), it does give Hello a prominent position in front of any other WebRTC method available to Firefox users, which could make Hello more competitive to whatever else may come along—for example, a chat button on a Web page.


Will there be competition? Yes, and it’s coming in force.

Last October, Microsoft announced plans to incorporate a form of real-time communication said to be compatible with WebRTC, called ORTC, into a future version of Internet Explorer. It will be given the Skype brand, even though ORTC is not the P2P technology historically associated with Skype.


Microsoft then followed up that announcement the following month with the declaration that its Skype brand would absorb both its Lync business conferencing and its RTC efforts, signaling that Skype may not only become a featured brand in Windows 10 but in its browser as well. We may learn more about this on Jan. 21, when Microsoft unveils more details on its next operating system in an event at its Redmond, Washington headquarters.