An interactive-experience source generates a picture following a change in an interactive session and estimates a quantization parameter for at least a portion of that picture. An encoded picture size is determined and used with an encoder frame rate to predict an encoding bitrate. A current variable bitrate of a connection to a client device is measured and compared with the predicted encoding bitrate. When the predicted encoding bitrate exceeds the available connection bitrate, the method increases the quantization parameter to raise compression and then encodes the picture using the increased value. This adaptive adjustment enables the system to regulate per-frame bitrate based on real-time network conditions and maintain stable delivery of encoded pictures to the client device.