[matthewmacleod]

WebRTC is a total pain in the arse in practice - maybe I've just had a bad experience, but it seems to be a ludicrously over complicated solution to the problem, and still ends up unreliable.

I don't think that implementation of it is anywhere near as easy as you think.

[microcolonel]

Most of the complexity in the WebRTC ecosystem (aside from things that are already done for you) is in the server space. You need STUN/TURN, you need to scale it, you have no idea how exactly to achieve that without spending infinite money. If your clients don't support your codecs, or you're proxying to SIP land (where you often won't have common codecs aside from A-law PCM), then you have to figure out a way not to blow your budget (both money and latency) on transcoding.

That said, if you don't have the client in your browser, nobody gets to even try.

You may think that WebRTC is a pain, but try implementing video chat with getUserMedia and WebSockets, or a custom plugin, and get back to me on how much of a pain WebRTC is.