We Mass-Deployed 15-Year-Old Screen Sharing Technology and It's Actually Better

A team built a sophisticated H.264 video streaming pipeline over WebSockets for their AI coding platform, only to discover that simple JPEG screenshot polling works better on unreliable networks. The article details their journey from WebRTC (blocked by enterprise firewalls) to a custom 60fps H.264 solution (failed on poor connections) to a hybrid approach that adaptively switches between high-quality video streaming and stateless JPEG screenshots based on network conditions. The key insight: stateless JPEGs (100-150KB each) provide better reliability and lower bandwidth than stateful video codecs when network quality degrades, while maintaining responsive keyboard/mouse input over WebSockets.