Delivering Low-Latency Streaming for All: Wowza Co-Founds SRT Alliance

“A knotty puzzle may hold a scientist up for a century, when it may be that a colleague has the solution already and is not even aware of the puzzle that it might solve.”

― Isaac Asimov

Does anybody in the streaming-video industry really have all the answers? Have we solved for every last use case, or invented the perfect infrastructure? As Asimov says, technology is a knotty puzzle—and sometimes it’s good to have help.

Wowza recognizes the cost-effective delivery of high-quality, low-latent streaming video faces a variety of challenges—the most difficult being the ability to deliver at scale while maintaining high interactivity. That’s why, at the 2017 NAB Show, we made an announcement with Haivision about the founding of the SRT Alliance and the open-source availability of SRT™. In this video from the show, Peter Maag, chief marketing officer at Haivision, and Carlos Perez, chief revenue officer at Wowza, explain the goals and benefits of the SRT Alliance:

If you aren’t familiar with SRT technology, it stands for Secure, Reliable Transport. Developed by Haivision, it’s a transport protocol that enables the delivery of high-quality, secure, low-latency video across the public internet. SRT:

• Optimizes streams with dynamic endpoint adjustment, based on network health monitoring between endpoints
• Provides end-to-end security with AES encryption
• Leverages sophisticated packet-loss recovery
• Enables simplified firewall traversal

In this way, SRT provides an effective solution to some of the biggest challenges of delivering streaming video. Wowza is excited to be co-sponsoring and supporting the SRT open-source initiative to promote the adoption of SRT.

Why Was the SRT Alliance Created?

The SRT Alliance is a commercially funded group dedicated to promoting the industry-wide recognition and adoption of SRT. Fundamental to our mission is the support and management of a freely available, open-source video transport protocol. We hope this will accelerate innovation through collaborative development.

The benefits offered by SRT include:

• Pristine quality: Protects against jitter, packet loss and bandwidth fluctuation, so your viewers get the best viewing experience.
• Low latency: Configurable control delivers low-latency video for full interactivity between video streams.
• Secure streams: End-to-end 128/256 bit AES encryption ensures your content is protected, from contribution to distribution.
• Cost-effective: Provides an alternative to extremely expensive satellite-transport infrastructure.

Is SRT Right for Me?

SRT presents a fundamental technology for high-performance, end-to-end video streaming for building:

• Encoders
• Streaming servers
• Decoders
• Set-top boxes
• Embedded media players

It may also be a good fit for use cases such as:

• Broadcast solution providers
• Video streaming technology vendors
• Enterprise video platform developers
• Live event producers
• OEM hardware developers
• Hardware or software builders needing low-latency video streaming

Haivision has been delivering encoders and decoders with SRT technology for years, and the Wowza team is excited to join in. We will be incorporating SRT technology within our offerings, starting with Wowza Streaming Engine™. This will help us receive and deliver low-latency, high-quality and cost-effective streaming solutions.

Want to Join the Alliance?

As a leader in the streaming industry, Wowza is committed to advancing the open-source use of SRT technology. We are excited to find and collaborate with customers, industry leaders and alliance members to make future advancements built on SRT available within the open-source framework.

Are you as excited as we are about the unlimited possibilities the SRT Alliance brings? If so, join us! There are three ways to get started right now:

• Visit SRTAlliance.org: Learn more information about SRT and read FAQs
• Join the Alliance: Companies that want to actively participate in growing the ecosystem of SRT can contact us at info@srtalliance.org.
• Download the SRT source code at Github: This includes build tools and sample applications, so you can immediately incorporate the protocol within your technologies. You can also improve upon, use and re-contribute (under LGPLv2 license) to SRT.

Let’s figure this knotty puzzle out together!

 

Full Video Transcription

 

Peter Maag:                        

SRT is a technology that Haivision developed for performance streaming across dirty networks like the public internet. It stands for Secure Reliable Transport, and it combines packet loss recovery, encryption and network health detection in a single, deployable package.

Carlos Perez:                      

The challenges of latency, the issues that are involved with packet loss, quality, with security—those are the challenges that we’re looking to address, and we see this as the start of that process, the two partners starting the journey.

Peter Maag:                        

The ultimate goal of the SRT Alliance is really to foster partnerships, to foster a de facto standard within the industry to solve the high-performance streaming requirements that everybody’s after today. Right now, the industry, the solutions that are present to address that, are very fragmented, and what we really want to do is drive adoption; get as many people on board as possible; get the creative minds in the market to contribute to the Open Source Initiative and drive the technology further.

Carlos Perez:                      

Open-source is a great answer to competing standards, competitors pushing different ways to address this issue. Wowza is looking for industry-wide answers, and with our partner, Haivision, we believe open-sourcing is the way to go.

Peter Maag:                        

So the next steps are the continuation of that process, to get the open-source community—to get everybody interacting with SRT and driving it towards standardization.