NAB 2017: Haivision, Wowza Media Systems Form SRT Alliance to Support Open Source, Low-Latency Video Streaming Initiative

Wowza Media Systems and Haivision announced the founding of the SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) Alliance at the NAB Show today. The partnership introduces to the industry the open-source availability of SRT, a video transport protocol to enable the delivery of high-quality and secure, low-latency video across the public Internet.

Despite advances in internet streaming, live video transport has faced a variety of latency challenges. This includes complications from origin network conditions, CDN caching and video transcoding, and last mile network congestion, among other issues.

To solve these challenges, Haivision and Wowza are making SRT available as an open source full-stack protocol that provides a secure and reliable solution for low latency video transport with packet loss recovery, end-to-end security with AES encryption, network health monitoring between endpoints, and simplified firewall traversal. Developers can use SRT to send video over any network, including the public internet.

Applied on encoders, streaming servers, decoders, set-top boxes and embedded media players, SRT presents a fundamental technology for high performance end-to-end video streaming. SRT can be used by broadcast solution providers, video streaming technology vendors, enterprise video platform developers, live event production companies, OEM hardware developers, and any developer needing low latency video streaming for hardware or software.

SRT is available on GitHub as source code with build tools, along with sample applications, so developers can immediately incorporate the protocol within their technologies. Developers can also improve upon, use, and re-contribute (under LGPLv2 license) to SRT.

“The most difficult challenge for interactive streamers is being able to deliver at scale while maintaining high interactivity,” says Charlie Good, chief technology officer and cofounder at Wowza. “To accomplish this feat, you need a protocol that can deliver across the technology stack, seamlessly and without fail, but does so with the lowest end-to-end latency possible. SRT is the first solution that’s offered freely by the leaders in the streaming industry, that has the potential to transform streaming applications for years to come.”

“We’ve released the SRT source code for any developer who wants to deliver low-latency video streaming solutions for their users,” said Peter Maag, chief marketing officer, Haivision. “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.”