Gauging The True Potential Of SRT Technology

Secure Reliable Transport, or SRT, is an open-source video transport protocol that enables the delivery of high-quality, low latency, video across IP networks securely. It accounts for packet loss, jitter and fluctuating bandwidth all while maintaining the integrity and quality of video and helps to overcome the challenges of live video transport like point-to-point streaming, RTMP contribution and cloud-to-cloud transport.

Why choose SRT?

Originally created by Haivision in 2012, the protocol was born out of a need to fix a preexisting problem concerning IP-based transport protocols, which at the time didn’t deliver what the broadcast market required for low latency video transport.

Haivision then made SRT open-source in 2017 and created the SRT Alliance. As a result, the protocol has been rapidly embraced across the industry as one of the fastest-growing and broadly adopted streaming protocols. Since SRT is open source, there are no royalties, long-term contracts or monthly subscription fees required. It also works with various systems without the need for any special adaptations or modifications making it far more flexible and future-proof than other protocols.

Today, the SRT Alliance is made up of more than 500 members. Manufacturers are now incorporating SRT into their products, and just about every camera, encoder, decoder and media player on the market has SRT built-in, which enables contribution and distribution from and to any device.

How can over-the-shoulder (OTS) collaboration enable broadcast and post workflows?

As a direct effect of the ongoing pandemic, teams across the globe had to adjust to working remotely. Without a centralized on-premises work environment, the OTS type of collaboration that is commonplace within our industry became a challenge. Clients and collaborators had limited access to content, making it harder to review and implement changes quickly and teams needed a setup that enabled real-time collaboration.

The fix was simple: If content is to be viewed by a single endpoint, encoded video from a broadcast input can be transported using the SRT open-source protocol to ensure extreme security, low latency and reliability to one SRT-enabled device. When the content needs to be viewed by multiple stakeholders, encoder video can be routed and replicated through SRT Gateway to reach numerous destinations. SRT Gateway is a scalable and secure solution for routing live video streams to one or multiple destinations and can run on premise or in the cloud.

What’s next for SRT?

From the tech side, SRT has had several inflection points during its development like the addition of fast file transfers. And with more media organizations than ever leveraging SRT to support their “work from anywhere” flexible approach, we expect the technology to continuously evolve as organization’s needs demand.

From a workflow standpoint, cloud and cloud-based workflows are major developments to keep an eye on. As we shift more toward remote work, broadcast infrastructure solution providers have the unenviable task of trying to judge when this shift will cross the point of no return.

Additionally, we are seeing a big innovation shift towards the CDN space. It’s not clear yet what peer-to-peer technology will look like in the future, so at this stage, we’re looking to answer difficult questions. Can we do it again? Do we need to do it again? What’s the most important thing to do in the industry?

As we look towards more innovative ideas and solutions that will drive up the market and take consumer experiences to the next level, it’s an exciting time for the streaming sector and our industry.

Craig Wilson is product evangelist at Avid.