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
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)In Star Trek, the Universal Translator translates speech between aliens with entirely different frames of reference (e.g. humans and sentient gas clouds). Presumably it’s also doing some false-colour magic to video streams that come from species with totally different visual perception. Next to that, decoding some data stream that you already know is a video feed seems quite easy.