There is a class of video where a second
of delay breaks the experience: a guest on a
live show, an agent answering in a conversation, two
operators in a shared control room. For that class,
the transport is Web R T C — built
for low-latency, two-way media in the browser. WAVE runs
real-time on its own edge. The real-time layer is
an edge Web R T C S F U
on Cloudflare — whip to publish, whep to play,
terminated close to the user so the round trip
stays short. WAVE adds the rest: broadcast transports next
to it (N D I, Dahn-tay, O M T,
Mock), captions and voice, and one open A P
I over the whole set. Edge-native, open on top.
When to reach for Web R T C. -
Two-way interaction. Anything where both ends talk and latency
is felt. - Browser-first. No plugin, no app —
it runs where the viewer already is. - Sub-second
targets. When the budget is hundreds of milliseconds, not
seconds. For one-to-many delivery where a few seconds of
latency is fine, H L S is cheaper and
simpler. Web R T C is the tool when
the interaction is the point. What "sub-second" depends on.
Latency is a chain, and the transport is one
link: - Network path. Pushing media to the edge
keeps the round trip short. - Encode and decode.
Real-time codecs and modest G O P settings over
long ones. - Jitter buffer. Smaller buffers cut delay
and cost a little resilience — a deliberate trade.
- The far end. A caption that is two
seconds late is useless; an agent that takes 800
ms to answer breaks the turn. WAVE runs this
layer edge-native so the path stays short, and exposes
the controls through the A P I instead of
burying them in a console. Using it through WAVE.
The real-time transport is one option on the same
A P I as everything else: Start a real-time
session, or fan the same source out to H
L S for the audience that does not need
to interact — one A P I, two transports.
Under the hood that publishes over whip and plays
back over whep at the edge (), but you
address it the same way you address any other
transport — by naming it in the call. Where
it fits. Web R T C is the conversational
link. WAVE makes it one transport among many, agent-payable
through the same gateway, so a real-time call and
a broadcast delivery look the same from the A
P I's point of view. - Real-time and transports:
docs dot wave dot online - A P I:
A P I dot wave dot online