Callaba outlines strategic protocol selection for modern live video architectures

The focus moves away from finding a single 'best' protocol toward building multi-protocol pipelines that optimize for specific user experiences. As platforms shift to hybrid contribution models, understanding these boundaries is critical for minimizing the high compute costs associated with transcoding and repackaging. Miscalculating these selections can lead to either unacceptable latency floors in interactive apps or massive CDN overages in audience-facing streams. Watch for increased adoption of the WHIP standard to potentially bridge the gap between RTMP ease-of-use and WebRTC performance levels.

The transition toward specialized protocol roles is reflected in broader market data. Per Haivision’s 2025 Broadcast Transformation Report, while legacy RTMP remains a dominant ingest standard, professional adoption of more resilient protocols like SRT has reached 77% to combat packet loss on public networks. This architectural shift is driven by the fact that RTMP cannot natively support modern codecs like HEVC or AV1 without proprietary extensions, a gap that newer standards like WebRTC (WHIP) and SRT are filling in 10-bit and HDR workflows.

Simultaneously, the WebRTC market is experiencing explosive growth, with Fortune Business Insights projecting the sector will grow from $9.56 billion in 2025 to over $13 billion by late 2026. This growth is primarily fueled by the 'video calling and conferencing' segment, which is expected to command a 51.57% market share. Despite this, HLS remains the undisputed leader for massive audience distribution. As noted by Dacast in May 2026, the standard modern workflow has solidified into a 'split' architecture: high-reliability ingest (RTMP/SRT) translated at the server side into low-latency delivery (WebRTC) for speakers and high-scale delivery (HLS) for the general audience.