Ever since we made SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) available to the open source community on Github last year, we’ve witnessed exponential growth in the number of video streaming solutions and applications leveraging SRT. With more live content and events being covered by broadcasters, video streaming services, and enterprises, SRT has become the de facto standard for secure and reliable streaming across unpredictable networks including the public Internet.

SRT is now the fastest growing video streaming movement in the world and has the support of VideoLAN’s VLC, Wireshark, FFmpeg, and the GStreamer open source projects in addition to the growing support of the over 140 SRT Alliance member companies.

SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) solves two critical issues for video streaming:

• For streamers: the limitations of the legacy RTMP protocol for ground to cloud streaming
• For broadcasters: the cost and uncertainty of proprietary solutions to overcome the challenges of streaming over the public internet and to cloud workflows

As the SRT community continues to grow, the SRT protocol benefits from greater scale and interoperability between on-premise and cloud-based elements that make up broadcast, streaming, and AV production ecosystems. Television broadcasters are using SRT to source live video over the Internet for remote production workflows. OTT services are relying on SRT for streaming between and within various cloud infrastructures and edge points across the globe. Thousands of leading global companies are adopting SRT for delivering high quality video streams to and across both ground and cloud-based infrastructures.

The momentum has now been given a huge boost with Microsoft announcing that it has joined the SRT Alliance — a consortium of vendors and end users established to increase industry-wide awareness and adoption of SRT as a common open source standard for low-latency video transport over the internet.

Microsoft Azure cloud-based services fuel the world’s leading television broadcast and video streaming workflows while Office 365 and Microsoft Stream are driving business communications for the world’s largest corporations and emerging innovators alike. By showing their support for SRT, Microsoft is further solidifying the protocolSRT as the industry standard for low-latency video streaming by enabling their customers to fully benefit from secure and reliable video streaming from anywhere to anywhere across any network.

Microsoft’s announcement is a significant milestone for the SRT movement and yet it’s only the beginning. With the number of companies and users already relying on SRT combined with all of the high value video software and cloud services from Microsoft and its Azure partner solutions, I can’t wait to see all of the possibilities that this will bring.

Want to learn more about the SRT project? Recently, we hosted a panel discussion at IBC 2018 regarding reliable video streaming over public networks with SRT, featuring panelists to Al Jazeera, Viacom, Sky News, MediaKing, and Haivision. Watch now for free to learn about their experience with SRT and why SRT continues to be the fastest growing open source streaming project.