Flash-based Audio and Video Communication in the Cloud (1107.0011v1)

Abstract: Internet telephony and multimedia communication protocols have matured over the last fifteen years. Recently, the web is evolving as a popular platform for everything we do on the Internet including email, text chat, voice calls, discussions, enterprise apps and multi-party collaboration. Unfortunately, there is a disconnect between web and traditional Internet telephony protocols as they have ignored the constraints and requirements of each other. Consequently, the Flash Player is being used as a web browser plugin by many developers for web-based voice and video calls. We describe the challenges of video communication using a web browser, present a simple API using a Flash Player application, show how it supports wide range of web communication scenarios in the cloud, and describe how it can interoperate with Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based systems. We describe both the advantages and challenges of Flash Player based communication applications. The presented API could guide future work on communication-related web protocol extensions.