Meet the RTC.ON workshop host:

🥁 Luke Curley, co-creator of MoQ 🥁

The mind behind Media over QUIC, bringing a hands-on session to our community. Full details are on the way – but we wanted to make sure you heard it from us first.

Tickets are on sale now at the lowest price they'll ever be, and spaces are limited. Use code NEWS15 for additional 15% off 💸 The code is valid until April 26.

We are opening

🚀 RTC.ON 2026 CFP 🚀

Share a hard problem you solved, an optimization that made a difference, or something you shipped and are proud of. Topics range from voice agents and AI encoding to streaming infrastructure and beyond – but if yours isn't on the list, submit it anyway. Proposals close May 24.

See full list of topics & what you get as RTC.ON speaker below:

ARXIV ORG | Link

TQCodec: Neural Audio Codec for Music Streaming

Most neural codecs obsess over ultra-low bitrate speech. TQCodec goes after the 32–128 kbps sweet spot that music streaming platforms actually care about, at full 44.1 kHz. It pairs a heavy cloud-side encoder with a lightweight sub-10 GMAC mobile decoder. At 64 kbps, it reaches near parity with Ogg Vorbis at 96 kbps - which, if it holds up in the wild, is a big deal for bandwidth-constrained mobile listeners.

W3C WORKING DRAFT | Link

WebRTC Encoded Transform

The Encoded Transform API lets developers intercept encoded media frames in a WebRTC pipeline via JS Workers - enabling E2E encryption, custom processing, and more. The fresh March 2026 draft adds crucial metadata: captureTime (derived from RTP Absolute Capture Time) enables millisecond-accurate lip-sync and glass-to-glass latency monitoring, while a new frame counter prevents reordering during processing. A solid step toward making the browser's media engine a truly programmable pipeline.

NETFLIX BLOG | Link

Netflix Live Goes VBR

Netflix has rolled out Variable Bitrate encoding across all live events, replacing CBR. Instead of burning a fixed bitrate regardless of scene complexity, VBR targets consistent quality - spending fewer bits on simple shots and more on fast-action sequences. The real engineering challenge was on the CDN side: deep bitrate dips during calm scenes tricked servers into over-admitting sessions, causing overloads when the action spiked. Their fix reserves capacity, based on nominal, not actual, bitrate. A/B tests showed 5% fewer rebuffers, 15% less data transferred, and 10% lower peak traffic.

CLOUDFLARE BLOG | Link

Cloudflare Realtime & RealtimeKit

Following their Dyte acquisition, Cloudflare is entering real-time comms. RealtimeKit is a full SDK suite wrapping WebRTC into a developer-friendly package, backed by an SFU running across 300+ PoPs with dynamic quality adaptation. It plugs straight into Workers, Durable Objects, and Workers AI. With Cloudflare's scale, this could seriously shake up the RTC platform market.

KHRONOS BLOG | Link

Vulkan Compute Shaders in FFmpeg

FFmpeg now uses Vulkan compute shaders to hardware-accelerate codecs that have no fixed-function support - FFv1, ProRes, ProRes RAW. Fully GPU-resident, no CPU hand-offs. Since FFmpeg is embedded in virtually every media tool, this brings pro codec acceleration to consumer GPUs. VC-2, JPEG, and APV are next.

We hope you enjoy the RTC.ON newsletter as much as we do. It's great to see all of you joining us each month for a little multimedia walk through – thanks!

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