Goals 2026

2026 Goals

What are the most impactful and important things we can do with Pion this year? What can we do to improve the lives of internet users and developers. As a group we are most effective with WebRTC, but we shouldn't limit ourselves. Even if you have never contributed to Pion, or don't even use it I would still love your feedback!

Join our discord or create a GitHub issue would love to hear your idea.

Provide career opportunities

Greatest impact we can have on peoples lives. Should we start a system making it easier for companies looking for WebRTC developers to hire Pion contributors? Can we pay people to work on Pion?

Find owners/maintainers for every Pion repo

Each Pion repository should have multiple maintainers (at-least 2-3) who care about the project and have a rough vision for where it's going.

This doesn't need to be official or heavy-weight, and maintainers don't need to personally fix every issue. The goal is simply that:

1. Someone is paying attention.
2. Issues and PRs are acknowledged.
3. Multiple repo maintainers so local direction and context aren't lost when one person is busy or disappears.

A healthy target would be to keep open issues and PRs as close to zero as possible, or at least always understood and intentionally open.

This is our current open issue/PR count per repo as of 2026-01-19:

webrtc                       69
mediadevices                 60
sctp                         33
example-webrtc-applications  29
ice                          27
interceptor                  24
dtls                         17
opus                         15
ion                          11
turn                         8
mdns                         5
stun                         5
rtcp                         4
bwe-test                     3
rtp                          3
datachannel                  1
explainer                    1
sdp                          1
transport                    1
website                      1
browser-tests                0
bwe                          0
ci-sandbox                   0
logging                      0
quic                         0
rtwatch                      0
scp                          0
srtp                         0
webrtc-bench                 0
webrtc-voicemail             0

Release a initial version of ion

A WebRTC Server that autoscales and handles common use cases out of the box.

• Native container and K8s support.
• Abstraction around media stream for future things like AI support?

WebRTC easier on microcontrollers

WebRTC on microcontrollers allows developers to build their own security cameras, robotics, AI assistants etc.. Lots of interesting projects and products, but still too hard for most to jump in

sepfy/libpeer is the best library for this. Getting involved with this project would have a huge impact. Making it work for Arduino would open it up to a whole new segment of developers.

Networking and Performance

Continue optimizing the core libraries to handle higher loads and more complex network environments.

• Connection Bonding: Bonding multiple network interfaces would allow for greater throughput by aggregating bandwidth across connections.
• sendmmsg support: sendmsg support on Linux devices would allow sending multiple messages in one system call, which should significantly reduce overhead and latency for high-throughput application.

Interactive Learning+Debugging of Offer/Answer model

Users can drop their Offer/Answer and understand what is happening during the session.

• How many media sections
• What codecs are enabled
• What header extensions are enabled (and what do they do?)
• Did the Answerer reject MediaSections
• ?

This project would belong under WebRTC for the Curious. Maybe explainer.webrtcforthecurious.com?

WHIP for better screensharing

WHIP for screensharing is improving the lives of internet users.

• Better performance/lower power usage
  • OBS + FFmpeg have nvenc and zero copy. Better performance then browser
• Higher Quality. I can set my Encoder and settings explicitly

These are both true, possible today with VirtualCamera

• More Sources. Can capture from more then getUserMedia/getDisplayMedia
• Custom Layouts. I can do a scene or other layouts

---

I want to support this by creating betterscreenshares.com and show people what is possible. Encourage services to support this use case. Show users what they could have!

WHIP for better livestreaming

WHIP is creating a new dynamic in livestreaming that I want to support/empower as much as possible.

Low Latency streams are more connected

WebRTC is nice for small groups of friends. Users like to stream a movie or gameplay, and then chat with each other. This is a healthier dynamic then watching someone broadcast one way.

Cheaper to run

Simulcast means server operators don't have to run transcodes. Using WebRTC for Ingest+Playback also reduces complexity on operators. I am hoping to see more self hosting and small stream services because of this. You only need to pay for bandwidth, not compute now!

Streaming without software

Groups that use Broadcast Box seems to have one technical friend (who sets up and maintains server). Friends will then join as watchers only, or maybe will broadcast via browser. What's great about WebRTC is that the barrier of entry is so much lower. You can send your friend a link and pull them in just via their browser.

I believe we can bring in new groups of users/voices to livestreaming if we reduce the barrier of entry. Users can can do software like OBS or ffmpeg, but not limited to it.

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• Create informational site whipforstreamers.com (?)
• Continue to improve Broadcast Box
  • Built-in Chat
  • Rebroadcast to RTMP
  • ?

Voice AI?

Most WebRTC development is happening because of demanded in Voice AI. I would love to empower people, but I am not aware of anything in particular that would fit in with the Pion communities talents + ethos.

It would be interesting if ion could make things easier.