Peer-to-Peer Watch Rooms, Explained
What 'peer-to-peer' actually means for watch parties — and why it matters for privacy and quality.
A peer-to-peer watch room sends your video directly from your device to your friends' devices, with no server in the middle re-encoding it. Here's what that buys you.
Direct connections via WebRTC
WebRTC negotiates the shortest path between your browsers. Most of the time, that's a direct UDP connection. When direct paths fail, an encrypted relay takes over so the room still works.
End-to-end encryption
Media is encrypted with DTLS-SRTP between peers. Even if a relay carries packets, it can't read them.
What we (don't) see
Our servers help peers discover each other. They never see your stream and they don't store room contents.
Tradeoffs
Peer-to-peer is great for small groups. For very large audiences a CDN-style fan-out makes more sense — that's not what we're building.