Deepgram is acquiring Daily, and Pipecat gets its own foundation. The MoQ camp came back for another round on why OpenAI picked WebRTC for voice agents. Philipp Hancke looked at what distributed and cascaded SFUs mean for Matrix’s decentralised calling.
⭐ Tsahi’s Pick
Deepgram Is Acquiring Daily and Establishing an Independent Pipecat Foundation (Daily)
Daily, a WebRTC video API vendor, is joining Deepgram. Pipecat - Daily’s AI framework - stays open source and moves under a foundation with a steering committee. Daily’s customers are told nothing changes: Deepgram will sell, support and develop all of Daily’s current products. If you ask me, the video API was the door and the voice agent framework is what Deepgram bought, with the WebRTC network coming along as the transport underneath it.
📰 This Week in WebRTC
OpenAI still has a WebRTC Problem (moq.dev) - round two of the MoQ author’s rant against WebRTC for voice AI
Arm or x86 for WebRTC media servers: participants per node on 3 clouds (OpenVidu) - OpenVidu continues with its vibe coded explorations of its deployment options
WHIP Is an RFC, WHEP Is Not Yet. Budget 0.6-1.3 s, Not Sub-500 ms (Fora Soft) - this one is hard to read slop. Skimming through it, it seems to fail at pinpointing the 500-ms vs 1.4s latency difference in WebRTC deployments
Distributed and Cascaded SFUs (webrtcHacks) - Philipp Hancke on what Matrix’s decentralised calling means for SFU design
📣 Sponsor
Beyond WebRTC Projects: Build Your Complete Engineering Team
You’ve reached a pivotal moment. Your WebRTC application is successful, user adoption is growing, and you need to expand development capacity significantly.
💭 This Week’s Thought
Deepgram is acquiring the leading AI framework: Pipecat. I’ve charted here the GitHub stars of the 4 popular open source AI frameworks. Pipecat and LiveKit Agents are in the lead. Agora’s TEN has flatlined along with Stream’s Vision Agents. This is about attention and not actual use. It will be VERY interesting to see what this looks like in 3 months’ time.
BTW - I am writing a deeper analysis of the Deepgram/Daily/Pipecat acquisition. If you want to receive it - reply “pipecat” to this email.
📢 Releases
What’s new in STUNner v2.0.0? - STUNner grows from a TURN server into a Kubernetes media gateway, with SIP, SRT and RTSP gateways in beta and a new open-core model
Wowza Streaming Engine 4.12.2 - mostly security hardening, plus a fix for WebRTC playback failing on edge applications