Eric Kinnear (linked post; Apple) is the author of the HTTP/2 fallback for WebTransport, so it's safe to say that WebTransport will be available in WebKit at some point.

Great news! It looks like Google GRPC team is probably waiting for Safari Webtransport support to implement grpc over the web in WT. Even though Chrome has had it for 2 years they have kept saying they’ll wait until it becomes GA.

I am not at Twitch anymore so can't speak to what the state of the things today are.

WebRTC was deployed and is in use. For twitch.tv you have Guest Star [0]

You can use that same back-end via IVS Stages[1]. I always call it 'White-label Twitch', but it is more nuanced then that! Some pretty big/interesting customers were using it.

[0] https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/guest-star?language=en_US

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ivs/latest/RealTimeUserGuide/wha...

I agree with the general thrust of this, but libwebrtc has a tendency to have Google convenient defaults which are distinctly non obvious, such as the quality vs framerate tradeoffs being tied to what Hangouts needs to implement as opposed to useful general purpose hooks. (I hope they have updated that API since I last looked). Once you know how to poke it to make it do what you want, which tends to require reading the C++ source, it's definitely got a massive head start, especially around areas like low level hardware integration. Even bolting on ML inference and so on is not hard. The huge point though is everyone knows everyone has to talk to libwebrtc at some point, so it is the de facto implementation of SDP etc.

Curiously I was working on a webrtc project for about 18 months which also hit the wall, however, since then I have learned of several high profile data only libwebrtc deployments, which really just use it in the way classic libjingle was intended to be used, P2P, NAT punching etc. I'd go so far as to say if you don't have a P2P aspect to what you're doing with libwebrtc you're missing the point.

The big picture though is there seems to be a general denial of the fact that web style CDNs and multidirectional media streaming graphs are two totally different beasts.

I think they'll catch up because libwebrtc is huge and can't take advantage of most of the existing browser protocol stack. WebTransport is a pretty thin layer over HTTP3, which already gets used much more often than WebRTC's SCTP-over-DTLS ever will. Not to mention the fact that it takes like two orders of magnitude less code to implement WebTransport than the whole WebRTC stack.