Quality is always a priority in WebRTC communications, and becomes even more critical in media applications that demand high-fidelity audio and video recording.
On April 23, 2025, we welcomed Michalis Daniilakis, Co-founder and CTO of Chord.fm, a browser-based podcasting platform that leverages WebRTC to deliver studio-quality production. Achieving that level of performance came with valuable technical lessons. Michalis walked us through the architectural decisions that shaped their application. We dove into key topics like local and cloud recordings, congestion control, and media prioritization—essential considerations for anyone building high-quality WebRTC solutions.
Read Michalis’ LinkedIn article: Demystifying bufferbloat issues in a WebRTC-enabled app.
Bonus Content
- Our regular monthly industry chat with Tsahi Levent-Levi. This month’s topic: Mentoring High Schoolers in WebRTC Application Development You can also watch this content on our YouTube channel.
Scroll down for key insights and episode highlights.
Watch Episode 101!
Key Insights
⚡ Local recording is both essential and hard in WebRTC apps. Local recording promises studio-quality content for WebRTC-based platforms like Chord.fm—but it’s not easy. Syncing local and cloud recordings, dealing with browser constraints, and enabling seamless remote collaboration present real engineering hurdles. Chord faced these head-on to deliver a high-quality in-browser experience. As Michalis explains, “I think we did for sure expect some challenges when it comes to kind of having to bring this high-quality content within a browser environment entirely, because this is what we do. We operate today at least within a browser environment, and we wanted to support this idea, to build up towards this idea of remote collaboration with bringing the best quality, the best kind of output that someone can have within such an experience. So we looked a bit around and what other tools are trying to achieve, and what some challenges might be and solutions to similar problems and we identified that local recording as we may hear it as a term out there, is something that a lot are trying to kind of approach in a similar sense.”
⚡Why General Meeting Tools Fall Short for Podcasting and Content Creation. Platforms like Hangouts and Teams might work in a pinch, but they’re not built for the high-quality, stable workflows professional creators need. Chord.fm is purpose-built for podcasting and video production—delivering the bitrates, stability, and features that content creators demand. There’s a clear difference between using general tools and using the right one. As Michalis notes, “There’s quite a few tools, of course, like Hangouts and Teams, and all of those are very similar in the sense that they can be used to create content in a sense like that. However, they do not always provide the quality and the bitrates, and the standards that a podcaster, a video creator would be looking for. They lack some functionality. They also lack in terms of some stability.”
⚡ In WebRTC, Congestion Control Is Key to Balancing Quality and Performance Running cloud sync and local recording alongside a live WebRTC session sounds efficient—but it can choke your network and degrade real-time performance. Michalis explains how Chord.fm uncovered and tackled congestion control challenges when trying to balance multiple demanding workflows during live sessions. “Congestion is really a term, and congestion control that is closely related, to the quality of service, I believe, when it comes to WebRTC and live feeds and all of that. And so I guess it’s kind of having to understand that, well, there is, at the end of the day, some packets that are being delivered and packets that are being received. That’s how network basics are being done here. And then what we’re doing on top of it is we’re saying, we’re running a separate workflow on the side that we’re delivering our local recordings, and we’re syncing this with the cloud. And we’re doing it while a WebRTC is in session. And so the two are a bit overwhelming at the same time, and they’re overwhelming the network. And this is where the problems started.”
Episode Highlights
Chord.fm: A WebRTC-Powered All-in-One Studio for Creators
Chord is a WebRTC-based platform that delivers studio-quality production tools directly in the browser. By combining recording, editing, repurposing, and collaboration into one seamless experience, Chord minimizes the friction creators face when juggling multiple tools.. Michalis explains:
“I feel there’s a lot of fragmentation and a variety of tools out there for creators today. There is the need specifically for podcasters and content creators within that space, not only within the producing space, but also within the recording, I should rephrase specifically, but also repurposing and editing. And this is exactly what Chord is trying to solve. It’s trying to bring an all-in-one platform, kind of a Swiss Army knife of producing, recording, collaborating with others as well, and repurposing, editing, and creating content as quickly as possible, eliminating a lot of the friction in terms of time and tooling that someone would need in order to get their content out there.”
What exactly does local recording mean in WebRTC?
Michalis and the team at Chord opted for the local recording strategy to achieve the highest possible media quality during remote collaboration. He shares his perspective on what that means in practice:
“We talked quite a bit about local recording. So I thought maybe putting just a couple of words here in terms of explaining what local recording is really, so the way I perceive it personally is the process of, because sometimes it can be confused and misused as a term, I think, out there. So it took me a while to understand actually what it is, I believe it’s the process of recording in a browser environment and syncing with cloud stores eventually, because at the end of the day, your content is still going to be on the cloud. It’s still going to be something that you’re going to have access to. You’re going to be able to go back and look at and start some post workflows. So it’s still being delivered somehow. It’s just that it happens as a secondary, let’s say, pipeline or goal within your workflow.”
Real-world, every scenario testing is crucial in WebRTC
It helps ensure a seamless experience for all users, especially when internet speeds vary significantly. As Michalis points out: “In a real-world scenario, as we’ve seen, for example, not everyone has a 20, 30, 50, 100 megabit upload speed. Not everyone has that. So people need to realize that it’s not always the case. Don’t take those assumptions for granted that everything works on the Internet. It doesn’t, because there’s users that will have less than 10 megabits uploads. And what are you going to do next, then? You can’t offer a high bit rate. So what I would suggest is kind of try and test that as a scenario. And not only on a browser level, try and put some, throttle your connections at the router level, at a device level, OS level, and then you’re going to see actually what happens in a real-world experience.”
Up Next! WebRTC Live Episode 102
“MOQ Me, Don’t WebRTC Me” with Ali C. Begen
Wednesday, May 21 at 12:30 pm EDT
