These 5 Unexpected Use Cases Prove WebRTC Has Outgrown Its Roots as "Just" a Video-calling Tool

WebRTC has long outgrown its roots as “just” a video-calling tool. Its core strengths—low latency, built-in encryption, and automatic NAT traversal—make it a powerful engine for a wide variety of real-time applications. Below are five non-obvious but highly practical use cases to inspire you and broaden your understanding of what WebRTC can do.

1. Telemedicine & Remote Surgical Assistance

Scenario: Enable a physician in a remote location to see and hear a patient (or an operating-room camera) in high resolution with minimal delay, and to send interactive commands back.

// Initialize on the patient side
const pc = new RTCPeerConnection({
  iceServers: [{ urls: 'stun:stun.med.example.com' }]
});
const stream = await navigator.mediaDevices.getUserMedia({
  video: { deviceId: 'endoscope-camera' },
  audio: true
});
stream.getTracks().forEach(track => pc.addTrack(track, stream));

Key Benefits:

• DTLS-SRTP encryption safeguards patient privacy.
• Latency ≤200 ms ensures responsive diagnostics and instrument control.

2. AR/VR Collaboration Environments

Scenario: Multiple participants jointly manipulate a virtual object, exchanging real-time scene data (positions, orientations, state) so everyone stays in sync.

// On each client
const dc = pc.createDataChannel('scene-sync', { ordered: true });
dc.onmessage = e => applySceneUpdate(JSON.parse(e.data));

function broadcastState(state) {
  dc.send(JSON.stringify(state));
}

Key Benefits:

• Peer-to-peer data exchange minimizes scene-update latency.
• Delta updates only (using CRDTs or custom protocols) save bandwidth.

3. Edge AI Pipelines: Model Output Streaming

Scenario: IoT cameras or devices run on-device AI (e.g., object detection) and stream only the high-value inference results to a dashboard, rather than raw video.

// On the edge device
const result = runModel(frame);  // e.g. { x, y, label, confidence }
const buf = new TextEncoder().encode(JSON.stringify(result));
dataChannel.send(buf);

Key Benefits:

• Reduced bandwidth by sending only inference metadata.
• Client CPU savings; heavy ML runs at the edge.

4. Peer-to-Peer IoT Device Streaming

Scenario: Real-time monitoring of many IoT devices—cameras, microphones, sensors—without a centralized media server.

// On each device
const pc = new RTCPeerConnection({ iceServers: […] });
const video = await getDeviceVideo();
pc.addTrack(video.getVideoTracks()[0], video);
pc.onicecandidate = e => sendCandidate(e.candidate);

Key Benefits:

• Horizontal scaling without a heavy media server.
• Native P2P encryption for every device stream.

5. Remote Robotics & Drone Control

Scenario: Stream live video from a drone, relay telemetry, and send control commands in near-real time.

// Command channel setup
const cmdChannel = pc.createDataChannel('commands', { ordered: true });
function sendCommand(action) {
  cmdChannel.send(JSON.stringify({ action }));
}

Key Benefits:

• <150 ms round-trip for safe, responsive control.
• Encrypted DTLS-SRTP protects against hijacking.

Comparison Table

Conclusion

WebRTC isn’t just for video calls—it’s a general-purpose real-time framework you can adapt to a huge range of scenarios: remote surgery, collaborative AR/VR, edge AI pipelines, distributed IoT streaming, and drone control.

Implementation Tips:

• Always configure STUN/TURN servers for reliable connectivity.
• Choose the right DataChannel mode: ordered/reliable for critical commands and document syncing; unordered/unreliable for telemetry and gaming.
• Use chrome://webrtc-internals and pc.getStats() to debug performance and network issues.

Give one of these ideas a try in your next project—you’ll be amazed how far WebRTC can take you beyond simple video conferencing!