[ARCHIVED] Conferences moving from Flash to HTML5

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kathleen1
Community Participant

Hi - I'm new to this area and just wondering if someone can give me a little more detail about "on our product radar." I am specifically looking at when Canvas Conferences (bigbluebutton) will have an HTML5 solution. The most recent thing that I can find is that it is on the product radar - which was posted in April, 2016. I did see the roadmap video that BBB did at InstructureCon in 2016, so it definitely looks like things are in the works. We are trying to decide if we should research other solutions or if we should hold out for the change to HTML5 - but it's tricky without having an idea of how long of a wait it will be.

Does anyone have any time line information on this move to HTML5, or maybe give me an idea of how long things are usually on the product radar. 

Thanks a lot for information!

Kathleen

Excelsior College

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ffdixon
Partner
Partner

Hi Kathleen,

I'm Fred Dixon, the product manager for BigBlueButton and CEO of Blindside Networks, the company that started the BigBlueButton project.  I'm only speaking on behalf of the BigBlueButton project and Blindside Networks (not on behalf of Instructure).

We've been providing hosting for BigBlueButton (Canvas Conferences) to Instructure for over four years now.

> I did see the roadmap video that BBB did at InstructureCon in 2016, so it definitely looks like things are in the works.

Yes!  I gave that presentation.   I can say that we (Blindside Networks and the BigBlueButton community) are working hard on an HTML5 client.  You can see the latest designs here

  http://docs.bigbluebutton.org/html/html5-design.html

You *will* see an HTML5 client for students released in 2017 (the instructor will still use the Flash client for the moderator capabilities).  Our plan is to be very close to a release of the HTML5 client come InstructureCon2017.

We're not moving away from Flash -- in fact we continue to add capabilities to the Flash client.  We are adding the ability for a pure HTML5 client to join the session as well.  The HTML5 client will implement all the capabilities today that exist for students in the Flash client except two-way sharing of webcams.  (We'll get the webcam sharing in a future release for the HTML5 client, but we didn't want to delay an HTML5 client when we can implement everything else first).

In addition to the HTML5 client, we are working on a mobile client for Android/iOS.  We need a mobile client for iOS as Apple does not support the web real-time communications (WebRTC) in mobile Safari web browser.  No WebRTC means no real-time sharing of audio/video in an HTML5 client, hence the need for a native client.

The HTML5 client does work quite nicely in an Android phone/tablet, which is the primary device we are testing.

I think you'll see a lot of cool stuff for mobile for Canvas Conferences in 2017.  Hope to see you at InstructureCon!

Regards,... Fred Dixon
BigBlueButton Project Manager

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