Add video conference to your app now
/Coronavirus has changed us and changing us. One of the biggest changes to our lives is the move towards reliance on video calls. We are now heavily dependent on video conferencing abilities to get our work done, communicate with friends and family and even strangers. The impact on business software is very significant, with any software platform having the video call capability getting a huge business advantage. This business need and the actual work related need is pushing pretty much every software platform to consider adding or improving video call support on their application.
A recent survey done by Trustradius on more than two thousand businesses have shown that even in the economic uncertainties of the pandemic most businesses are considering additional spend on video conferencing solutions.
Another very interesting trend that is coming out of studies like that is the interest in making remote work permanent even beyond the pandemic. The spend on security software (41%) nearly tripled in the last three weeks of April 2020 this is by itself an indicator of a longer term strategy that companies are taking for remote work. Remote work is being embraced as the norm in the post pandemic world.
Nearly 90% of increased spenders expect to still be using, and paying for, these tools two years from now.
At Kaz we’ve been working on video conferencing integrations and the WebRTC stack for years. We’ve built one largest platforms for video call based interpretation for hospitals and lawyers in the US. We have worked with the Jitsi stack, customizing it and improving it as the WebRTC itself has been changing. We have also been working extensively on 3rd party APIs such as Twilio to provide video conferencing solutions to our clients.
Here are some of our quick and easy strategies for integrating video conferencing to your application:
Cloud APIs for full integration
There are several very robust cloud solutions that takes away all the pains of setting up video conferencing servers and management by hosting them and giving developers APIs to work with. The beauty of such APIs are that they can be deeply integrated with your application with hooks to features that already exist in your platform. And the development investment of such integration is still very minimal - we are usually talking of days and weeks rather than months and years that a custom video conferencing solution would involve.
Twilio is pretty much the leader in this space, with video as one of their many offerings. Their full coverage on everything to do with online communications from PSTN lines, telephony, VoIP, text, etc. means that you can bring in any feature you can think of for remote conferencing/call/webinar type features. An interesting application we built using Twilio involves letting users call using their cell, punching in a pin code to get access to an online service which is managed by an existing web platform. Essentially opening up the existing service to a very large user base.
Other players in this space include Eyeson, Vonage, Sinch etc. who are all promising to make video call integration super fast. In most cases they are essentially very simple and you could be up and running in a matter of days with full feature video on your app.
Code snippet for Video call app hooks
The less integrated but still a super easy way of bringing in the option of having video calls in your apps is to embed a little script in your platform or your website to have users connect to existing popular video apps such as Skype, Zoom, etc. This is where you are talking about minutes to do the integration rather than days! And in most cases you don’t even need a software developers. Just follow some instructions of where to put the script in and wham you have video calls. Here are some of the popular ones:
Skype
Skype has huge adoption and it’s a good option to add. The way you do it is add a Skype share button. You can get the code and instructions from here: Get Skype Share Button. If you are running a Wordpress site then they have neat plugin to do it: WP plugin for Skype Share.
Zoom
Coronavirus has certainly made Zoom a star in the video call world. Zoom has an API for full integration, but there are 3rd party zoom integration options such as this wordpress plugin
Webex
Webex has a widget that involves just setting up the account and then plugging in the appropriate script to your site to enable webex calls.
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