SRT vs RTMP vs RIST: which streaming protocol do you need?

These three solve the same basic problem — getting a video stream reliably from one place to another over the public internet — but they're not interchangeable, and picking the wrong one is a common source of dropped or stuttering streams. Two questions get you to the right one.

RTMP is the oldest of the three and still the standard for pushing a stream to a platform — YouTube, Facebook, Twitch all expect RTMP (or its newer RTMPS variant) as the ingest format. It's simple and universally supported, but it has no real error correction for unstable connections, and it's a one-way push: it isn't designed for point-to-point contribution over difficult links.

SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) was built specifically to fix that: it adds encryption and active error-correction/retransmission, so it can hold a clean stream over a noisy or variable internet connection — a mobile 4G uplink, hotel Wi-Fi, a satellite backhaul — where RTMP would simply break up. This is what most modern contribution encoders, ours included, use for getting a feed from a remote site back to base.

RIST is the newest, designed as an open, non-proprietary alternative to SRT with similar reliability characteristics — increasingly used where broadcasters want an open standard rather than a single-vendor-driven protocol.

Rule of thumb: use RTMP if you're pushing straight to a public platform. Use SRT (or RIST, if your receiving end requires it) if you're sending a contribution feed over an unpredictable internet link and need it to stay broadcast-quality.