There was a post on HN a few months back of a gif-based realtime message transport : https://github.com/videlalvaro/gifsockets#readme

One way to improve my Instant Background Uploader app [1] and make it actually instant would be by doing just that. Generate the image URL right away and start streaming it while the upload continues.

Instead of waiting for upload to finish before giving you a URL.

But you'd need control over the image hosting backend cuz ImageShack won't let you do it.

[1] https://github.com/shurcooL/InstantBackgroundUploader_OS-X https://github.com/shurcooL/InstantBackgroundUploader_Window...

Interestingly, I already have an image uploading service (that only I use).

It may be a little complicated to make it do this, given how it works currently, but I might try it out.

I too had idly been thinking about this while viewing a few Vine videos that were all using it seemed h264 on iOS.

Great idea. But I guess the performance and latency must be an issue.