A persistent two-way connection between browser and server, so updates arrive the moment they happen instead of waiting for the next request.
Anything live depends on it — chat, collaborative editing, dashboards, odds, order books. Polling for the same effect wastes capacity and still feels a step behind.
We use realtime where staleness is actually visible to the user, keep reconnection and missed-message recovery in the design from the start, and keep the server stateless enough to scale horizontally.