Last week we made it about halfway through SmartPhoneMan’s day.  Let’s finish his day.  Right now, he’s in a rush to get home for the fantasy baseball draft.  Everyone is scattered across the country and uses different methods to call in – people call in from POTS phone, though not as many as the year before, some are on a laptop at home, some have a nice tablets on LTE networks, some are on cellphones, and a few have smartphones over Wi-Fi at a coffee shop.  After clicking a url, they get together for a nice video conference, including showing a video.  The draft goes on but SmartPhoneMan can’t execute a key trade he wanted to make since he’s not talking loud enough.  He realizes there is a “loudest talker algorithm” so he talks louder and is able to break in. Since SmartPhoneMan is late getting back to his house because of the emergency service text he made, so he has started the call on his smartphone but switches it seamlessly over to his large screen in his office once he gets home. He’s better able to participate in the draft this way.  Since he was getting excellent bandwidth on his smartphone he figures it wasn’t streaming HD to the smartphone since HD wouldn’t be necessary on such a small screen. But when he switches to the large screen at his home office, the picture is clear, so he knows the stream is now coming in with HD format.  And he remembers to talk loud so he can break in. He executes what he hopes is a key trade since he notices some interesting data that he hopes someone on a tablet can’t see.  He’s happy.  He’s not going to come in last this year!

During his fantasy draft, there has been a fire drill at work, so when SmartPhoneMan hangs up he finds seven voice mails on his phone. He listens to all of them and he knows he’s going to have to get to work today.  So he calls his wife and leaves a video mail. She’s used to looking at video on her phone since she is in the health services industry and they have increasingly been talking with remote patients using WebRTC and video, and they sometimes call her and leave video mails. They end up on a video call with each other though because they want to go out later and drink GREEN beer.  She’s talking to him from her laptop and he’s using his smartphone, so behind the scenes there are voice and video codec translations going on.  The call quality is excellent though and they agree on a place to meet to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.

What I have described above is not beyond the realm of possibility for a normal day.  It describes real-time communications that enhance your day.  Some of these services could be revenue generating and some of these services simply tie the subscriber closer to the service provider.  With media servers being the engine behind many of these real-time applications, they will play an increasingly prominent role in the battle for who owns the LTE subscribers – the service provider, the phone provider, or the search engine itself.

What kind of cool apps that use media servers do you use?