A new approach is proposed that contemplates systems and methods to support distributed stream media transcoding and sharing in real time. Under the approach, a host associated with a sender generates a high quality stream of media content that is to be shared with a plurality of viewers over a communication network. The hosting devices associated with the plurality of viewers are evaluated for their capability to process and/or transcode the high quality media stream. Based on the evaluation, the host of the sender encodes and transmits the high quality media stream to at least one selected host associated a viewer. Besides decoding the received high quality media stream and displaying it for its own consumption, the selected host of the sender further transcodes the media stream by re-encoding the high quality media steam into a different, probably lower quality media stream, and transmits the re-encoded media stream to a mobile device associated with another viewer, which then decodes and displays the lower quality media stream on the mobile device.