From proprietary to Open Source success

Creating a community around Haivision's SRT low latency video streaming protocol

Founded in 2004, Haivision is a market leader in enterprise video and video streaming technologies, helping the world’s top organizations communicate, collaborate and educate.

A pioneer in high performance streaming solutions, Haivision continues to innovate in the areas of live hardware and software encoding/decoding, video stream transport and management.

Video transport protocol

Initially developed by Haivision as an alternative to expensive dedicated networks, SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) is an innovative UDP-based protocol enabling high-quality, low-latency video streaming across unpredictable networks such as the public Internet.

Following its succesful implementation within their product line, Haivision sought Collabora's expertise to leverage the benefits of Open Source to erase the barriers to a broad adoption of SRT and enable interoperable streaming.

From establishing a tailored governance model and selecting the right license, to creating a plan to communicate effectively with the existing Open Source communities and wider ecosystems, Collabora provided strategic guidance throughout the process of launching a successful Open Source project.

Using GitHub and licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, the SRT video transport protocol implementation was made freely available in 2017, instantly simplifying its licencing and enabling wide adoption through collaborative development.

With secure, end-to-end AES encryption, optimized packet retransmission and controllable buffering, SRT leverages the best of IP standard attributes while maintaining compatibility to traditional UDP based broadcast and streaming workflows. Its main purpose is to send live TV streams across the Internet, for example, to upload to streaming services as a low latency replacement to RTMP or to send live broadcast grade streams without having to use a costly satellite link.

In addition to helping create the Open Source community around this groundbreaking low latency video streaming protocol, Collabora's multimedia team also integrated SRT into key Open Source multimedia projects such as VLC, GStreamer and OBS Studio.

Looking ahead

As the alternative to proprietary and expensive transmission protocols now backed by an Alliance of now more than 250 members (over 100 of which have launched SRT Ready™ products), SRT is undoubtedly well on its way to becoming the standard for low latency, secure, reliable streaming over the internet.