[programjoe]

Yeah, I agree 1 and 2 tackle very different problems. For additional context on what I've observed

For 1: I work in the live streaming space and see cases where an input stream may need to be composited, transformed, mixed in, or something and an entire webrtc stream needs to be setup (usually going through some 3rd party service, e.g. twilio). OBS is normally the go to for a single broadcasted show however in the cases I work with it's a lot of shows (independent streams) that need to be managed and generally have rules around how the compositing works. Hiring a person to manage OBS, VMix, etc... is wasteful and expensive in this case (and not necessary). WebTransport helps in being able to deliver audio / video (or any data) to an app and take care of that. If anything I see this technology as making it easier to build apps for AV and hopefully getting rid of some of the reliance on existing broadcast software which is really intended for the traditional studio setup.

For 2: It definitely seems like adoption is growing. Cloudflare supports WHIP/WHEP (in beta), livekit supports WHIP ingress, and Dolby.io supports WHIP/WHEP (although thats not a surprise since Sergio Garcia Murillo works there after the milicast acquisition and he's at the forefront of some of those standards).

Regarding 4, cloud rendering, this is just mainly a use case I've had to deal with more and more of lately where folks are trying to get off OBS and VMix for compositing shows. An example use case is joining streams from multiple sources at scale (usually for large scale LED wall installations and such) and dynamically adding content / graphics based on interaction, data, etc....

It's much easier to program in the rules and have it be re-useable / configurable vs requiring someone to setup OBS scenes (at least at scale). I agree, I don't like the browser dependency (primarily since the devex is quite terrible for all of this). However it seems to be coming from a place of the lowest common denominator. It's easy for someone to whip up a figma/design of what they want and have that translated to html, use a motion library for animating, and stick it into a video feed (especially if you're trying to stick with an existing brand where you may already have a website and web apps with all of that ready to go).