PubNub on Wednesday released an open source template to allow developers to add Skype-like video chat into their apps. The free template provides a fully functional video chat platform using WebRTC, PubNub and Google Authentication for a global, reliable collaboration solution.

"While the WebRTC protocol has created huge excitement as a way to deliver video chat ubiquitously, there's still a gap between the protocol itself and the ability to deploy a working, globally scaled, collaboration application using this technology," said Stephen Blum, CTO and co-founder of PubNub. "Now, by combining PubNub's Real-Time Network and WebRTC, anyone can deliver a true, Skype-like video chat app in a matter of days."

All the core elements needed to build and deploy a fully featured WebRTC video chat product are available as a documented, open source template. This new template leverages the browser's built-in WebRTC protocol for peer-to-peer audio and video, and adds the additional components needed for a fully deployable video chat application:

• Presence detection to see which friends are online using PubNub Presence
• Call signaling and initialization using PubNub Data Push
• Import friend lists using Google Authentication, easily extended to use Facebook, LDAP or other home-grown directory services.
• Text chat using PubNub Data Push and PubNub Storage/Playback

Together, these components allow any developer to add a globally scaled video chat solution to apps running on WebRTC-compatible platforms. All the source code, and a website with a working app using the template, is available here: http://webrtc.co/

About PubNub

The PubNub Real-Time Network provides the cloud infrastructure and key building blocks for real-time apps that scale globally to any device. PubNub enables real-time experiences like live dashboards and streams, collaboration, second screen synchronization, machine-to-machine signaling and more. While open source technologies like WebSockets, Socket.io and SignalR are helping bring awareness of the possibilities of real-time, PubNub's simple API delivers scalable, reliable real-time interactivity across mobile, browser, desktop and server, and supports over 50 environments, including iOS, Android and JavaScript. With traffic distributed across 13 datacenters worldwide, PubNub currently powers thousands of real-time apps and streams three million messages per second to over 100 million devices each month. Customers include: Rebtel, Viggle, GetTaxi, Humble Bundle, StageIT, Spreecast, Celly, Monotype, Class Dojo and more.