When plucky little Haivision was delivering its victory speech in late 2018 after a year of “people losing their minds” over SRT, Microsoft was among the key partners being thanked. This was a fitting tribute following the unveiling of SRTHub running on Azure at NAB earlier that year, which proved a pivotal turning point for Haivision and for global adoption of the low latency SRT protocol.
Faultline said at the time that, as a steppingstone towards getting SRT integrated into OTT video software and relevant streaming platforms, they don’t come much bigger than Microsoft. Well, it turns out, they do, as AWS has finally signed on the dotted line to become a member of the SRT Alliance some two and a half years since Haivision told us it was having conversations with AWS.
While these clearly difficult discussions have taken an outrageously long time to reach fruition, we can say with confidence that if AWS has anything near the influence on SRT adoption over the next three years, as Microsoft has in the past three years, then things are about to reach a whole new level of crazy. As SRT climbs to stratospheric heights, Haivision – as a founding developer of the technology alongside Wowza – is of course in line as a primary beneficiary.
While AWS says joining the SRT Alliance and adding native SRT support to AWS Elemental MediaConnect is a result of demand from customers, we know for a fact those same customers have been shouting for SRT support from the rooftops for years.
“AWS user groups are screaming for SRT,” a Haivision representative told us in 2018.
Some brave defectors may have even jumped the AWS ship as a direct result of the ongoing absence of SRT support – yet anything other than a mass exodus is mere cannon fodder to a behemoth like AWS.
MediaConnect has long supported secure live video transport using protocols including RIST, Zixi, and RTP with forward error correction, so there is no obvious reason why AWS would drag its heels for this amount of time.
Our only suggestion for the tardiness in adopting SRT is that the association with fierce cloud rival Azure was a deterrent for AWS. With the SRT Alliance reaching over 450 members today (it had 140 members at the time of our showstopping October 2018 interview with Haivision), the advantages of getting into bed with SRT were far outweighing any competitive grudges.
Belatedly, AWS wants to advance the adoption of SRT while enhancing MediaConnect, which is able to translate between these low latency protocols – allowing customers to build a varied ecosystem of reliable transport applications inside and outside the AWS cloud. For example, a workflow can be built by sending live video to MediaConnect using SRT as the input, and then outputting the video using RIST and Zixi protocols.
It expands to the software-based AWS Elemental Live video encoder too, with customers able to receive SRT streams – with its famous protection against packet loss – in the latest Elemental Live update.
For Haivision, there are obvious synergies from having its Maxito X4 encoder included in the AWS Media Services Compatibility Program.
But while running the SRTHub in Azure was all about achieving reach and capacity based on an open framework within the broadcast industry, as a cost-effective and agile alternative to satellite transmission, AWS is very much about SRT reaching a new flavor of user base. It will put SRT on the map of a global web of media outfits of all shapes and sizes – many that didn’t even exist this time last year but will go on to achieve great things.