SRT, the facto standard in streaming

SRT is the acronym for Secure Reliable Transport, a video streaming protocol created by the Canadian Company Haivision, oriented to signal transport and similar in concept to UDP (User Datagram Protocol).

SRT is used to connect two video points with ultra-low latency and high image quality over unmanaged and untrusted networks, with the following features:

Encryption AES 128/256.
Packet loss recovery with ultra-low latency.
Audio and video timing recovery.
Each point can be assigned sender, receiver or rendezvous mode.
Network functioning detection between the two points.

This technological stack is Open Source, it means, this can be implemented by any company without paying for licences. This allowed Haivision to win a technical EMMY in 2019.

Ultimately, it is not only the answer to streaming traditional problems, but also it has come to replace the expensive satellite connections. It is the solution to most of the streaming problems and as well, an enabler for workflows and solutions.

It is Open Source

Because of being an open source protocol, SRT is being adopted globally by all kind of companies. Any developer can access GitHub and implement it in their own solutions to enable the functionalities SRT can offer, and thus, transmit streaming over any type of network including the public internet. To this end, a considerable amount of documentation and tutorials completely public have been written.

SRT Open Source is distributed under the licence MPL-2.0, which allows contributions to the protocol improvement from the users community. Thanks to this, the protocol is in constant enhancement nourished by the ideas and experiences of the community.

Haivision is in charge that all the inputs are perfectly coordinated, aligned and wrapped.

SRT Open Source is available at GitHub: https:/github.com/haivision/srt.

But, why Haivision “gives away” this technology to the world? It makes it to ensure it becomes, as it is already happening, a de facto standard adopted by all the audio and video industry.

Thanks to the joint efforts between the community and Haivision, there is a huge universe of solutions fully compatible with each other.

The importance of being all allies. SRT Alliance

All that happens in the SRT community is coordinated through the SRT Alliance.

This was created by Haivision in april 2017 and nowadays consists of more than 450 members and is still growing.

Some of the companies that are part of it are: Avid, Microsoft, Telestream, Cinegy, Comcast, Evertz, Grass Valley, Eurovision, AJA, Imagine Communications or Panasonic.

SRT Alliance mission is to offer Support in the adoption of SRT in the whole world, being in constant communication with the members, promoting different activities such as Tuesday SRT webinars that happen 2 Tuesdays a month in which real use cases are discussed and also in Pre COVID and Post COVID eras to support in events the main audiovisual shows, advertisements and press releases, and of course, to crystallise business opportunities and joint development: www.srtalliance.org.