webrtc vs hls vs rtmp: which to use

pageofcups
edited August 2022 in Q&A

my team is thinking about a video app and we’ve been throwing the term “streaming” around but we’re in a very early exploration phase and kinda new to this.

My doing a bit of digging I see webrtc, HLS, RTMP among other terms and I’m trying to figure out which to use. What factors should we take into consideration when deciding which of those things (?) is right for our use case. I know that latency is one disctintion but I’m sure there’s more to it that I don’t udnerstand or know about yet

Answers

  • marco
    marco Moderator, Dailynista admin

    Marco from Daily here 👋

    We get this sort of question regularly, and the answer is that it really depends on what you are building, and what sort of experience you want for your users.

    As a good place to start is: What is your expected call size: is it 2, 20, 200, or 2,000, or 20,000 participants?

    That alone can help you narrow down your choices. Have you figured that out yet? Approximately, it doesn't have to be set in stone.

  • chad
    chad Community Manager, Moderator, Dailynista admin

    In the not-yet-post-pandemic times, I typically talk about it as "Twitch vs. Zoom." I laid it out over here. TLDR: Twitch is RTMP/HLS; Zoom is WebRTC. :)