SRT – A New Open Source Protocol For Low-Latency Video Transport Over The Internet
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Millions of dollars of savings are being achieved as broadcasters continue to switch from expensive satellite ad-hoc contribution to the public internet. Reliability, low latency, and high-quality connectivity has been difficult to achieve and wrapped in secrecy as vendors locked broadcasters into proprietary software and centralized server systems.
But in a ground-breaking development, Haivision have open-sourced their internet media distribution protocol. Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) facilitates broadcast-quality and cost-effective media exchange. It not only meets the stringent timing and latency requirements of video and audio streaming but has made the source code freely available to download.
Private networks also take advantage of SRT as its firewall friendly. Removing TCP from the protocol significantly reduces latency and peak demands on the network, and swapping FEC for ARQ optimizes bandwidth.
SRT looks like it has enormous potential and is already in use by ESPN, the EBU, and Ericsson. And if you want to see how it works, you can even download the code, compile, and test it yourself.
This whitepaper is a valuable source of information and will improve the knowledge of anybody wanting to further their understanding of internet media distribution.
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