Jaya Vardhan

WebRTC SDK vs Build: What You Actually Write Yourself

The browser gives you ICE, encryption, jitter buffering and congestion control for nothing. Then you discover that none of those were the expensive part. Here is the itemised list of what you write yourself with raw WebRTC — and why only one item on it is about video.

Bandwidth Cost

WebRTC Bandwidth Estimation: Why Your Call Downgrades Before It Drops

Users report that the video got worse and the network graphs look fine. Both are true. WebRTC watches queues filling rather than packets dying, so it reduces quality before anything is actually lost — and that pre-emptive downgrade is the mechanism that stops the call from failing.

Codecs

H.264 vs H.265 Over WebRTC: Why the Storage Codec Breaks the Live Path

Your cameras record H.265 because it halves the storage. Most browsers still cannot play it, and the ones that can need the right hardware. That gap is not an engineering problem — it is a patent-licensing outcome — and it is what puts a transcoder on your live path.

NAT traversal

NAT Traversal in WebRTC: Why the Call Connects on Wi-Fi but Not on 4G

Same two people, same app. On Wi-Fi it connects instantly; on 4G it does not connect at all. Nothing changed but the network, and that is the entire explanation. Here is what NAT is actually doing, why one specific pairing can never work, and why mobile is where you meet it.

Firewall System

Why WebRTC Breaks Behind Corporate Firewalls — And the TURN/TCP Fallback That Fixes It

The call works on your laptop, at home, on your phone, and in every test you ran. Then you demo to the customer whose deal you need and nothing connects. Here is what corporate networks actually do to WebRTC, the fallback ladder that gets through, and what that fallback costs you.

Video Latency

What Sub-80ms Video Latency Actually Means — And Why Most "Real-Time" Isn't

A commodity webcam and a 60Hz screen consume about 110 milliseconds before a single byte is encoded. So sub-80ms glass-to-glass is not fast — it is arithmetically unavailable. Here is what the number actually measures, why that is still legitimate, and the one question worth asking.

Video Architecture

WebRTC Architecture: Everything That Runs Between Two Video Tabs

A video call is a chain of eight stages, and only two of them are video. The other six are negotiation and transport — which is why almost nothing that breaks in browser video is actually the video. Here is the whole chain, in order, with what fails at each link and who owns it.

Video Conferencing Infrastructure

Add Video to Your App: Why the Demo Takes an Afternoon and Production Takes Months

The prototype works on the first try, and that is the problem — it teaches you the wrong estimate. Two laptops on the same office wifi exercise almost none of what production video has to survive. Here is what actually consumes the schedule, and a scope table you can plan against.

TURN Cost

The TURN Bill: The Self-Hosted Video Cost Nobody Forecasts

Everyone budgets for the media server. Almost nobody budgets for the relay that sits in front of it — even though roughly one session in five goes through it, and a relayed stream is paid for twice. Here is what TURN actually adds to a self-hosting bill, and what skipping it costs instead.

Bandwidth Cost

Why Your SFU Bandwidth Cost Scales With Viewers, Not Publishers

Five hundred cameras cost less to run than one fifty-person meeting. Publishers are close to free on a media server; viewers are the entire bill. Here is the arithmetic behind that asymmetry, four workload shapes priced side by side, and the two levers that actually change the number.

Simulcast

What Is Simulcast — And When Does It Save or Waste Bandwidth?

Publishing three resolutions does not cost three times the bandwidth — it costs about twenty percent more, because bitrate scales with pixel count. But the bandwidth was never the real cost. Here is what simulcast actually charges you, and the ladder mistake that makes it expensive.

SFU vs MCU vs Mesh

SFU vs MCU vs Mesh: Which Topology Your Call Size Actually Needs

Every video call generates the same quadratic amount of work. The routing topology does not reduce it — it only decides who pays: the client's uplink, the server's CPU, or the server's network. Here is where each model puts the cost, and the call size at which each one stops working.

Video Conferencing Infrastructure

SFU Scaling: Clustering, Cascading, and Where the Bottleneck Moves

Scaling an SFU is not one problem. The bottleneck moves three times — from the worker process, to the network interface, to the links between servers — and each move changes what you should be measuring. Here is where each limit bites, with the arithmetic behind it.

Video Conferencing Infrastructure

Scaling Video Cost: What Happens When One Media Server Isn't Enough

A single media server does not fail at a user count. It fails at an egress number, and that number grows with the square of the room. Here is the arithmetic behind a 40-person call, the bandwidth bill it generates, and why the same workload costs 90x more on one venue than another.

video surveillance

Talk-Down at Ten Seconds Is Theater: The Surveillance Intervention Latency Budget

An operator warns a man who left the frame fifteen seconds ago. Intervention runs on a latency budget, and it is paid twice — once carrying the event to the operator, once carrying the reaction back. Here is where every second goes, which stages you control, and which you never will.

Proactive Surveillance

The Operator-to-Camera Ratio That Decides Whether Proactive Monitoring Pays

In a study of 73 operators, detection ran around 50% and only 12% caught more than three-quarters of targets. That ceiling, divided into the cost of a round-the-clock seat, is the operator to camera ratio — the number that decides whether proactive monitoring is a business or a subsidy.

Logistics

Yard and Dock Video: Watching the Loading Bay from Head Office in Real Time

You can locate a trailer to the metre and still not know what happened at the dock door. The questions head office can't answer are operational, not criminal — and nearly all of them are timestamp questions. Here's what warehouse yard video has to get right to settle them.

Loss Prevention

Retail Loss Prevention in Real Time: From Reviewing Theft to Interrupting It

Retailers have never recorded more and shrink still rose to 1.6% of sales. Footage documents theft; it does not interrupt it. Here's what retail loss prevention video can realistically change in the aisle, what the numbers honestly support, and where cameras are the wrong tool entirely.

Perimeter Security

Perimeter Intrusion Detection: Catching the Loiter-and-Probe Before the Breach

Sandia's framework is blunt about it: if nobody assesses the alarm, there is no detection. That single line reframes perimeter intrusion detection — the value isn't the sensor at the fence, it's catching the approach early enough that a response still has somewhere to go.

video surveillance

Multi-Camera Synchronization: Why Your Four Angles Drift Out of Alignment

Four cameras cover one incident and produce four different accounts of when it happened. Multi camera synchronization fails in two separate places — the clock that stamps the frame and the pipeline that delivers it — and fixing one does nothing for the other. Here's how both break.

video surveillance

The Blind Five Seconds: What Live View Latency Costs You on a Video Wall

On a video wall, clicking one camera to full-screen can cost three to five seconds of live view — starting the instant an operator spots trouble. Here's what causes that live view latency, why no dashboard catches it, and how a system built for live video closes the gap.

Proactive vs Reactive

Proactive vs Reactive Surveillance: What “Proactive” Actually Means — and Who's Really Doing It

Every camera vendor now sells “proactive,” and most mean reactive with a quicker alert. The real difference is a response loop reactive surveillance doesn't have. Here's what separates proactive surveillance from reactive, who actually runs it, and where reactive still wins.

enterprise video solutions

Enterprise Video Conferencing Architecture: What Actually Runs Behind the Six Enterprise Checks

Six enterprise checks reduce to one architectural question: how much of the media path can you actually run? This technical companion walks each — deployable stack, server-side recording, scaled SFUs, admin APIs, failover behind the SLA, and white-label — layer by layer.

enterprise video solutions

What “Enterprise-Grade” Actually Means for Video Conferencing — and What Vendors Hide Behind the Label

Every vendor sells an 'Enterprise' plan; almost none tell you what it buys. On most platforms it's just the top pricing tier on a consumer product. Here are the six checks — deployment, recording, scale, APIs, SLAs, white-label — that separate real enterprise video from a rebrand.

video API integration

What Happens When Your Video API Provider Gets Acquired — or Shuts Down

Twilio announced the end of its video API, then reversed. Dyte got acquired and folded into Cloudflare. When you build on a video API, the roadmap belongs to someone else — and it can move without your consent. Two real cases, and five portability questions to ask before you sign.

Video room api

What Is a Video Room API — and How Is It Different from a Video SDK?

Everyone reaches for the SDK when they build video. But the SDK only joins the call — something on your server has to create it, guard it, and decide who gets in. That’s the video room API. Here’s what each layer does, and why the split is the difference between a demo and a system.

SFU guide

What Is an SFU — and Why Does Every Video Platform Use One?

You’ve seen “SFU” in every architecture diagram and never a definition. An SFU forwards video streams selectively instead of mixing or re-encoding them — which is how modern calls scale past a few people. Here’s what it does, why it beat mesh and MCU, and why every platform runs one.

Integration Effort

How to Integrate a Video SDK: Rooms, Tokens, Tracks, and the Parts the Quickstart Skips

The quickstart gets two people on video in an afternoon. Production needs the parts it skips: server-issued scoped tokens, selective track subscription, STUN/TURN, a real recording pipeline, and clean teardown with reconnection. Here’s the full path to integrate a video SDK properly.

Video SDK

Adding Video to Your Product: What “Integrate a Video SDK” Actually Costs and Commits You To

Integrating a video SDK takes an afternoon — which is exactly the trap. The real decisions are the four commitments the quickstart never mentions: the pricing model that compounds with success, where your video data routes, how locked in you become, and whose brand it looks like.

Proprietary video SDKs

Video Call SDK vs Video Conferencing SDK vs Video Chat SDK: What’s the Difference, and Which One Do You Actually Need?

People search “video call SDK,” “video conferencing SDK,” and “video chat SDK” as if they’re the same product. They’re not — each maps to a different media architecture. Here’s what runs under each term, and a one-question test for which one your use case actually needs.

video surveillance

Multi-Site WebRTC Surveillance: Building the Site-Edge Relay and Central SFU That Scales to 50 Sites

From RTSP at 50 sites to WebRTC on one SOC wall. The edge relay that pulls on demand and repackages H.264, the central SFU that forwards only subscribed streams, WAN tuning for long-haul links, and failover that survives a dropped site — the design behind multi-site WebRTC surveillance.

video surveillance

Multi-Site Video Surveillance Architecture: Why Connecting 50 Sites to One SOC Isn’t a Bandwidth Problem

Cameras at 50 sites, one control room, and feeds that stutter — so you buy a bigger pipe. That fixes the wrong thing. Here's why multi-site surveillance is an architecture problem, what always-on streaming really costs versus on-demand pull, and what the right design looks like.

PTZ

PTZ Over the Web: Why Steering a Camera Is Harder Than Streaming It

Streaming a camera is one-way; steering one is a closed control loop through a human watching delayed video. This piece explains why PTZ over WebRTC is bounded by video latency — and how the data channel, ONVIF commands, control arbitration, and a dead-man's switch make it usable.

NVR

Where to Tap the Stream: Adding Live Browser Video Without Fighting the NVR

A camera has only a handful of connections, and the recorder already holds one. This technical companion walks NVR live streaming as a stream-source decision — camera main-stream, sub-stream, or NVR re-stream — plus single-pull fan-out and recording-priority reconnection.

Cloud Video Surveillance

You're Never Greenfield: What It Really Costs to Put Existing CCTV in a Browser

“Add cloud video” sounds like a fresh build, but every real deployment already has an NVR recording. This piece breaks down the real cost of cloud video surveillance on an existing estate — sunk CapEx, camera connection limits, and the egress bill nobody puts on the quote.

video surveillance

Why Watching 500 Cameras Is a Decode Problem, Not a Bandwidth Problem

Your network can carry 500 camera streams — but one workstation can't decode 50. This piece breaks down why the video wall is a decode problem, not a bandwidth one: dual-stream cameras, server-side mosaics, and full resolution only where an operator is actually looking.

VSaaS

Live Video in Surveillance: Why RTSP Cameras Still Can’t Talk to Web Browsers in 2026

Every IP camera speaks RTSP; no browser does. This piece walks the whole story — codecs, RTSP, the browser gap, and the RTSP-to-WebRTC bridge that finally gets live cameras into a tab — plus the H.265 transcode trap that separates a one-camera demo from a 200-camera deployment.

Open-Source Video Infrastructure

Build, Buy, or Embed: The Technical Decision Guide for Video Infrastructure

Every real-time video product runs the same six components — build, buy, and embed only change who operates each. This technical guide walks the stack, maps each path to the layers you own versus inherit, and covers the portability question that decides how hard it is to leave.

cost-benefit analysis

White-Label Video Infrastructure: Build, Buy, or Embed — A Decision Guide

The cheapest way to launch video is often the most expensive way to run it. This guide compares building on open source, buying a cloud API, and embedding white-label infrastructure across speed, unit economics, control, and OEM rights — so you pick the path you won’t have to rip out.

video recording architecture

Video Recording Architecture: What Runs Behind the Pipeline at Scale

An SFU forwards video without decoding it; a recorder can’t. This deep dive walks the recording pipeline — composited vs raw RTP capture, scaling the recorder tier, storage tiering and egress, and how tamper-evidence, WORM, and residency get built into the pipeline rather than bolted on.

video recording infrastructure

Video Recording at Scale: Architecture, Storage, and the Compliance Trap

Recording looks like a checkbox but behaves like three separate systems. It covers why recording breaks before live streaming, the storage-and-egress math nobody runs, and the compliance trap — retention, chain of custody, residency — that decides if your archive is an asset or liability.

enterprise video solutions

Enterprise Video Architecture: What Runs Behind Each Tier When You Move Beyond Zoom

"Beyond Zoom" is really three enterprise video architectures — meeting tools, cloud video APIs, and self-hosted infrastructure. This technical companion walks each: what runs under the hood, where your media flows, and what you own at every layer.

enterprise video solutions

Beyond Zoom: What Businesses Actually Need When They Outgrow Consumer Video Calling

Everyone Googles “Zoom alternative for enterprise” — but that’s the wrong question. This piece breaks enterprise video calling into three tiers, the five things you actually need when you outgrow Zoom, and the real per-minute cost math, so you can name the tier and let the shortlist write itself.

fleet video

How Fleet Video Streaming Actually Works — The Architecture Between Vehicle and Command Centre

Cameras speak RTSP; browsers speak WebRTC. This deep dive walks the fleet video streaming architecture packet by packet — the RTSP-to-WebRTC bridge, the SFU that fans one feed out to many viewers, the latency budget, and the offline-recovery problem no SFU solves alone.

fleet video

Why Edge AI Alone Can’t Solve Fleet Video — And What the Cloud Layer Needs to Do

Modern dashcams run AI on the edge — but they can’t stream live to a command centre. This piece breaks down what edge does well, the three things it physically can’t do, and the fleet video infrastructure layer that fills the gap.

build vs buy RTC

Per-Minute Video Pricing at Scale: What Enterprise Teams Actually Pay

Per-minute video pricing powers most video APIs. At enterprise scale — 500 concurrent users — it costs $25,000+/month. This article breaks down real math from Agora, ZegoCloud, and Dyte, what building your own costs, and what alternative pricing models exist.

Open-Source Video Infrastructure

Open-Source Video Infrastructure for Enterprise: Why Companies Outgrow Jitsi, LiveKit, and Self-Hosted WebRTC

Open-source video infrastructure like Jitsi and LiveKit is a smart starting point. At 250 concurrent sessions, it costs $90,000–$144,000/year to maintain. Real costs, scaling limits, missing features, and what the migration path looks like for enterprises.

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