halcy 
a common affordance in scifi is that spaceships can just video call each other, even spaceships of different races who have never met before. this implies that there is a sufficiently mathematically obvious RTC protocol that all spacefaring races eventually discover
„but halcy, the computer simply adapts the signal“ try piping an opus bitstream into chatgpt, see how that goes
„This situation where everyone uses their own protocol is ridiculous.“, says Alien A, „We shall develop one protocol that satisfies everyones ne-“ and before they can even finish, they are handed The Document. No one remembers where it came from originally, what the letters „XKCD“ mean, or the significance of the number 927
KolaMagpie@halcy Especially since you know every single one of the aliens' protocols is so convoluted and hampered to be backwards-compatible with whatever that species' first audio-video display system was. The USS Enterprise has a VGA input on their big screen 1000%
@KolaMagpie conference rooms in intergalactic conference centers are, by volume, 10% seating area, 90% storage for adapters. and yet, the one you need is missing, for some reason
@halcy Exactly one person on the ship or station knows how to fix whatever problem the current conference is having (the problem changes each time); it's a matter of tracking them down and they'll be like "oh yeah I had that three years ago you gotta plug this into that first, /then/ connect your tablet and route the call through the /BOX/ not the tablet, and it should work fine :)"