The default is to use lossless compression which is used when there is minimal network congestion or when explicitly configured, as might be required for scenarios where image fidelity is more important than conserving bandwidth, e.g. In low-bandwidth environments it uses lossy compression where a highly compressed image is quickly delivered, followed by additional data to refine that image, a process termed 'build to perceptually lossless'. The protocol also dynamically adapts its encoding based on the available bandwidth. Depending on the image, different codecs are used to encode the pixels sent since techniques to compress video images differ in effectiveness compared to those for text. Images rendered on the server are captured as pixels, compressed and encoded and then sent to the client for decryption and decompression. PCoIP is a UDP-based protocol that is host rendered, multi-codec and dynamically adaptive.

In 2013 Amazon licensed the PCoIP protocol for use in AWS Amazon Workspaces. In 2008, VMware licensed Teradici's PCoIP protocol, and supports it in VMware Horizon View. The protocol is available in hardware and in software. PC-over-IP (PCoIP) is a proprietary remote display protocol developed by Teradici. 'Teradici' was unique, sounded better and the domain name was available at the time. One-tenth of a tera is a deci, but 'Teradeci' didn't roll off the tongue. That company's product involved a 100-gigabit datacenter networking device. The Teradici name originated from a previous company the founders were incubating. Teradici developed a software implementation of PCoIP, which VMware started shipping in VMware View 4. In 2008, VMware announced it was licensing Teradici's PCoIP protocol. It operated in stealth mode until 2007 when they announced their first products, a blade server card and a small hockey puck shaped client, using a proprietary chip which implemented the PCoIP protocol. Teradici was founded in 2004 by Dan Cordingley, Dave Hobbs, Ken Unger and Maher Fahmi.

Hp pcoip zero client