What is NDI?

NDI (Network Device Interface) is a protocol developed by NewTek/Vizrt for sending professional-quality video, audio and metadata over a standard Ethernet network in real time. Instead of running dedicated SDI or HDMI cable between every camera, switcher and recording device, NDI lets you move multiple video streams over the same network switch your office already uses — at low latency and with frame-accurate sync, which is what separates it from general-purpose streaming protocols like RTMP.

There are two flavours worth knowing apart: full NDI is near-lossless and built for local-network production (typically 100–150 Mbps per 1080p stream — budget your network accordingly), while NDI|HX is a more heavily compressed variant designed for lower-bandwidth links, including Wi-Fi and longer-distance IP connections, at the cost of a small amount of additional latency.

In practice, NDI has become the default way broadcast and live-event facilities tie cameras, graphics, switchers and recording into one network rather than a tangle of point-to-point cable. If a device can output or receive NDI, it can sit anywhere on that network and talk to everything else on it without a dedicated cable run.