marquis

Raise your hand if you have worked hard building an honest product that does what it says, only to see another business rise up to claim the same thing but based on smoke and mirrors. Must be an age-old trick, maybe akin to the octopus pretending to be a plant so it can catch prey, or the angler fish's glowing trap in the dark.

Currently in the mobile space everyone is behind at least one double-NAT at least, and you can order business level access for your wireless data account and get an IPv4 address allocated to you. AT&T does this for a single $500 fee for example, Sprint as a monthly $3 fee. I imagine this will become common with ISPs - you'll need to upgrade to a gaming/business class in order to make use of port-forwarding etc and for everyone else, some programs will cease to work or not connect as quickly/easily.

Chrome supports its own streaming method, MPEG-DASH with H.264 which is what Youtube runs on where possible. Firefox stated it won't support H.264 on principle (although it does now, for WebRTC). Android supports HLS, as does iOS, out of the box. HLS was designed to supersede RTSP however we also have the equally-ubiquitous RTMP, which Flash supports natively. You can get an HLS stream via Flash with an add-on to some clients so now this will work on IE, Chrome Firefox, and there are also some custom, proprietary clients out there for h.264/HLS. It's not a pleasant ecosystem right now..

>every couple years, go off and do something completely different

You mean, like take a vacation? You are saying exactly the same thing but with the time-scale different. I agree on that: work hard for 10 months, no days off. 2 months completely out of the office. But that assumes excellent health and no family.

Hipchat uses XMPP so you answered the parent's question perfectly. Slack, I believe, created a custom protocol.

Media players: browsers don't have native support for H.264 over HLS or RTMP, and MPEG-Dash seems native to Chrome only. If the browsers could accept these natively, this would certainly speed flash's demise. Until then, what are the alternatives?