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3 system design questions lean on this idea. Each walks through the full answer.
System Design Masterclass · Cloud Infrastructure
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Before WebRTC, real-time video in the browser required plugins. Flash, Java applets, or proprietary browser extensions. Each had security vulnerabilities, compatibility issues, and a degraded user experience. If you wanted peer-to-peer video calls, you needed to install Skype or a similar application.
WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is a set of browser APIs and protocols that enable real-time audio, video, and data transfer directly between browsers, without plugins and without routing through a server. When you make a Google Meet call, your video and audio travel directly from your browser to the other participants' browsers (when possible). The server handles signaling (who's calling whom), but the actual media flows peer-to-peer.
This matters for system design because WebRTC is how virtually all browser-based video conferencing works. Zoom (web version), Google Meet, Microsoft Teams (web), Discord, and hundreds of other services. Understanding its architecture explains why video calls sometimes fail behind corporate firewalls and why call quality varies so dramatically.