Bust out the streamers and balloons, we’re celebrating the 2nd anniversary of the low-latency streaming SRT protocol becoming open source!

It’s hard to believe that it was almost two years ago during the NAB Show that Haivision, the original developer of the protocol, announced the open source availability of SRT.

Allow us to indulge in a little retrospective!

Mighty Oaks From Little Acorns Grow

SRT started out as an idea in the fall of 2012 and was born from the need to reduce the high cost of contribution by satellite and private networks. Developed by Haivision, SRT was publicly demonstrated for the first time at IBC 2013, creating lots of excitement. As the technology progressed, Haivision released SRT as part of its product family and customers started to enjoy the benefits of high-quality, low latency secure video over unreliable public networks, including the internet.

It became clear that by expanding the footprint of SRT beyond Haivision solutions, more companies and customers could benefit from this exciting technology. The decision was made to release SRT on GitHub as an open source technology stack and protocol to encourage widespread adoption.

The vision has always been clear:  

“By opening up this technology to the world, SRT is the low-latency glue that bonds the video streaming ecosystem closer together – improving the way we all stream and continuing to significantly reduce internet streaming latency for the best viewing experiences.”  

2 years ago there were just 2 founding members of the SRT Alliance, created to support the adoption of the protocol, Haivision and Wowza. Now there are over 200 member companies worldwide, from a wide range of industries, many of whom have already implemented SRT into their solutions to address a variety of challenges.

Some SRT highlights from the past year:

• Membership of the alliance has doubled!
• SRT has been adopted by industry-leading open source initiatives including VLC, GStreamer, Wireshark, FFmpeg, Libav and, most recently, OBS.
• Big hitters like Comcast, Al Jazeera, NBC Sports, ESPN, NFL and Microsoft have all shared their experiences of successfully leveraging SRT to solve some of their biggest pain points.
• Haivision’s excellence and engineering creativity behind SRT was recognized with an Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering – we’re thrilled to be recognized by the NATAS Technology & Engineering Achievement Committee for “Pioneering Reliable Transmission Method for Live Contribution and Distribution TV Links.”                                                    

What’s New?

Haivision has just announced the launch of  SRTHub, a new media routing cloud service which helps broadcasters to securely and reliably transport live content and files using low-cost internet connections and the global Microsoft Azure network. To see SRTHub in action at the NAB Show, you can visit the Haivision or Microsoft booth.

The Best is Yet to Come

The most exciting aspect of the SRT protocol is that it’s a collaborative project with members continually contributing and working together to improve the technology. As the protocol matures and adoption increases, the possibilities are endless.

SRT Continues to Surprise Us

“SRT has already proven to be useful in so many workflows, and as it becomes known more as a true network protocol, it will continue to surprise the world,” predicts Peter Maag, CMO at Haivision.

Born from the need to connect facilities over the public internet for broadcast contribution, SRT made it its first impact outside of its initial “target use” as a replacement to RTMP for streaming to CDNs. Next, SRT was used for OTT stream distribution and syndication and now as “glue” for cloud microservice workflows.

“Who would have guessed that even within cloud data centers that secure and reliable transport was needed? It’s only through the accessibility and credibility of lightweight open source code that the world has trusted SRT to keep addressing new challenges.”

Discover More
Want to hear more SRT use cases and get a preview of the SRT technical roadmap? Together, Haivision and Microsoft are hosting 3 SRT Panels at NAB Show 2019, the SRT Technical Panel, the SRT Microsoft Azure Panel and the SRT Broadcast Panel.  

With less than a week to go, spaces are limited, so register today to reserve your spot!