Broadcast / video engineer
Needs a monitoring path that shows real pixels — focus, noise, banding — instead of a 1080p re-encode of a re-encode.
Remote production
Direct the shoot from anywhere, at full resolution.
Directors, DPs, and clients who can't be on set still need to judge focus, skin tone, and framing — not a 720p smear. 4K Chat carries every camera into the room as its own participant at the resolution the sensor actually produces, straight browser-to-browser.
- 8K
- Peak per-feed resolution, with no cap on any plan.
- 0 ms
- Server hop — media goes straight between machines, not via an SFU.
- AV1 / VP9
- Modern codecs with SVC, so detail survives a bad minute.
- Per-side
- Local recording at capture quality, not a cloud mixdown.
Who this is for
Director or DP on a remote shoot
Wants program plus two iso angles side by side, pinned, at a size where a focus pull is actually visible.
Client / agency reviewer
Joins from a link on a laptop or a Smart TV in a review room and sees the same frame the crew sees.
The remote-village problem
- Clients approve takes from a compressed screen share and re-approve later when they see the real footage.
- Multiple angles mean multiple tools — one call for people, another service for the program feed.
- Dedicated streaming boxes and cloud review platforms bill per hour, per seat, and per gigabyte.
Where normal conferencing breaks
- Conferencing platforms cap shared video around 1080p and re-encode it through their own servers.
- Screen-sharing a camera window halves the framerate and destroys colour detail.
- There is no way to give a second or third camera its own tile, its own bitrate, or its own controls.
What 4K Chat brings to it
Capture cards as participants
HDMI/SDI capture devices and cinema cameras join through the browser as full participants — their own tile, their own encrypted peer connection.
How it works →Real 4K and 8K
AV1 and VP9 with Scalable Video Coding — resolution follows the hardware and link, negotiated per peer.
How it works →Multiview with pin and focus
Drag tiles into the layout you want, pin the A-cam full-frame, and mute or hide any source without touching the shoot.
Local recording
Record on your own machine to WebM. The file lands on your disk — nothing is uploaded, nothing is transcoded by us.
Cameras never starve the room
Each camera runs its own bitrate ladder using only the uplink left over after the humans are served.
How it works →No media server in the path
Media goes browser-to-browser over WebRTC. Nothing about the shoot sits on someone else's infrastructure.
How it works →Setting up a session
- 1
Open a room on the set machine
One click creates the room; the join link is ready to paste into a text thread or a call sheet.
- 2
Add each camera as a source
Add capture cards and extra webcams as devices. Each one appears as a separate participant. WHEP encoders are coming.
- 3
Invite the remote village
Directors and clients join with one link — no account, no download, no plugin.
- 4
Pin, focus, and roll
Everyone arranges their own multiview. Anyone who needs a reference copy records locally on their own machine.
Gear that works
Capture cards (Blackmagic DeckLink, UltraStudio, Elgato 4K)
Appear as a normal video device and can be added as their own participant, so each camera gets its own tile rather than sharing one.
NDI and virtual cameras
Anything that exposes itself as a system camera works, including NDI Tools' virtual output and vision-mixer program feeds.
WHEP-capable encoders (coming)
Hardware encoders that speak WHEP will connect straight to the browser with no capture machine in the middle.
The uplink is the real constraint
Budget roughly 20–35 Mbps per 4K feed on AV1/VP9. Adaptive bitrate will hold quality down rather than break the call if the link cannot carry every angle.
Will this actually work for us?
Is this really 4K, or upscaled?
It is the negotiated encode, and the app shows the received intrinsic resolution per tile plus a session chart, so you can verify it rather than trust a badge.
What about latency?
There is no server hop, so glass-to-glass is typically well under a second and can be near-instant on a LAN. It is a monitoring path, not a frame-accurate genlock replacement.
Can clients join without an install?
Yes — a link opens in the browser. No account, no download, and no plugin.
Does adding angles hurt the people on the call?
No. Camera participants are marked low priority and take only leftover uplink, so human video is served first.
Questions we get
Does the remote side see the same resolution as the on-set monitor?
It sees what their link and decoder can sustain, and the live quality dashboard shows the actual received resolution frame by frame — no guessing.
Can we run a session all day?
Yes. Rooms renew their own lease, keepalives run in a Worker so background tabs don't stall, and connection recovery retries for as long as the call is open.
Keep reading
Recommended plan: Cinema
Headroom for several simultaneous camera participants alongside the crew.