Feature request : Secure Reliable Transport SRT

I am a long-time user of your products and I regularly advise my customers.
And I’m not going to go through your history of how you’ve impacted how you produce content today.
You are leaders in cold content production!
The fact is that you are missing the train of hot content, live streaming, relying too much on your leadership status.

You will tell me that the "live" option is accessible from your respective applications.
Except that you have targeted direct broadcasting to broadcast platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, etc...).
And therefore you have integrated the RTMP ingestion protocol.
A logical choice but nevertheless unsuited to the actual practice of live-streaming production.

Where do your users use your products? Outdoors, outdoors, on the street, by the sea, in the mountains.
Places where you don’t walk around pulling fiber and router.
So places where we operate 4G, an efficient but unstable network. One antenna change, an armored truck passing by, and that’s the cut.
The problem is that RTMP and network instability do not go together.
The RTMP is built on TCP packets that insist on all being received. If there is too much loss there is a clear cut of the signal, see bugs preventing the resumption of the stream.
A clean cut is fatal, it’s loss of audience, it’s uncomfortable for both production and viewers.

Then a new streaming architecture was set up: rather than sending the feed directly to the platforms, it was sent to a video mixer (OBS, Vmix, etc.) hosted on a stable network.
The mixer will dress the stream with overlays before broadcasting on the platforms. And in the event of a break in the video stream, it allows you to display a message to viewers without a sharp break.

Except that this architecture is cumbersome to implement by forcing to create an RTMP server in addition to the mixer.
And that this does not remove anything from the RTMP bugs via 4G.

Fortunately Haivision created a new video ingestion protocol in 2017. This time based on UDP and that is much more permissive on packet loss.
It is designed to lose information without ever producing a net cut.
A protocol already integrated in all mixers and that does not require deploying a server.
In short, a protocol built to be used on an unstable network like 4G and easier to deploy for the user.
This protocol is called Secure Reliable Transport or SRT (not to be confused with the format of subtitles).
It has proven itself, has been adopted by large productions as well as by single users, in all types of installations.

So I ask you: please integrate the SRT protocol into your applications and products for live streaming?

For the past five years everyone has fought to get around the RTMP problem. But the solutions are too costly, too complex, and inadequate.
A new wave of content creators will emerge from the popularization of the SRT and the HEVC bandwidth economy.
The small world of technicians is waiting for that, creators discovering simpler, stable and less expensive tools will rush on.
And right now you’re the big absent from this new wave.

Thank you for taking the time to read to me and hopefully convince you to join this new wave.

Wishing you a nice day.


Sincerely,

Thank you for your feedback. We really appreciate the time and effort you have invested in providing this suggestion to us. Your feedback will be definitely cascaded to the concerned team for further review. Thank you for your understanding and support.

I totally agree. Please look at srt.

I came here to submit this idea, and am pleased I am not the first one to think of this. Would be great for DJI Fly app to support both RTMP as it does, and SRT.

Same here. SRT is standard now. RTMP is old. Let's move forward.

Excellent idea ! I would be very useful !

+1 to this feature request. SRT or RTMPS streaming would be amazing to have. RTMP streaming is outdated and shouldn't be used, and many platforms don't support it anymore.

+1 SRT should definitely be available in 2024