Hacker News Reader

Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

Accounts are tied to the email address on your Apple ID. Interesting way of getting around having to create another IM account.

View on HN

It's also portable to when there is a version of FaceTime for Android/etc. They had originally claimed it to be an open standard.

Yeah, has there been any progress on publishing specs?

Deleted comment

Are you sure? That seems to be nothing but delivery of transport streams over HTTP and suggests nothing of negotiating calls ala SIP.

My bad - that was for HTTP Live Streaming. FTTM.

According to the presentation, it's supposed to be made a standard. I'm assuming this would hit the IETF's Audio/Video transport working group, so that'd be where to keep a lookout.

Nope.

"It's also portable to when there is a version of FaceTime for Android/etc. They had originally claimed it to be an open standard."

Android 3.0 (Gingerbread) is rumored to gain support for the same protocol used in the desktop version of Google Talk: Jingle. Jingle sounds a lot like FaceTime, I wouldn't be surprised if the two are compatible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingle_%28protocol%29

No word from Apple so far, but I recall them saying that they would share the code with whoever wants to implement it, which isn't quite the same as open sourcing it.

The sticky wicket isn't the protocols used to schlep the video, it's the session initiation. Apple's mapping phone numbers (for iPhones) and email addresses (for iPods and now Macs) to a central hub to initiate calls. That's how the FaceTime Mac application launches when someone initiates a call to my email address; on iOS I presume it uses push notifications.

Open-sourcing the protocol doesn't solve the integration issue, and Apple hasn't said anything publicly about letting third parties join this particular sandbox.

Pending ping integration?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com