Guides
Adaptive bitrate: keeping sessions smooth on bad networks
How our streaming pipeline measures latency and packet loss in real time to hold a responsive session on a congested connection.
Sam Okafor
May 11, 2026 · 7 min read
A remote session is only useful if it feels instant. On a clean LAN that is easy; on a hotel Wi-Fi connection it is a genuine engineering problem. Our pipeline continuously adapts to the network it finds.
Measure, then adapt
We sample round-trip latency and packet loss several times per second and feed them into a controller that trades resolution against frame rate to keep input feeling responsive.
- Prioritize input responsiveness over pixel-perfect fidelity.
- Drop resolution before dropping frame rate on congested links.
- Recover quality automatically as headroom returns.
The goal is that a technician never thinks about the network — they just work.
— Sam Okafor, Engineering
