WebRTC

Published At: March 5, 2024

WebRTC, or Web Real-Time Communication, is a set of specifications published by W3C and IETF that govern standard APIs over which applications perform peer-to-peer real-time communication.

At its core, WebRTC includes two major components. The first is RTCPeerConnection, a standardized pipeline for [codec] handling, security, bandwidth negotiation, and the other tools necessary to establish audio and video communication between peers in the WebRTC session. The second is RTCDataChannel, a low-latency data channel implementing the same API as WebSockets.

WebRTC is most commonly found in web browsers, but can be readily implemented by mobile or desktop applications as appropriate for their use cases.