When it comes to the current market for streaming standards, SRT remains king, according to a new report from Rethink TV.
In “Open Internet Contribution Protocols Forecast: 2026-2032,” the researcher charts the growth of open internet transport at the expense of legacy satellite and dedicated internet access (DIA) fiber lines, with growth propelled by new sources of live events—particularly tier-two sports, news reporting, music concerts, and livestreaming events, where the prosumer market can drive new shipments and open the door for these protocols.
Over the past decade, Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) has emerged as a practical solution for primary contribution, as well as cloud integration, playout, and multisite connectivity, evolving from its original use for reliable, low-latency video delivery over unmanaged IP networks, according to the researcher.
Other protocols in Rethink’s report don’t fare as well.
“RIST remains an ‘academic exercise’ for many vendors, with its most ardent supporters viewed as something of a ‘clan’ that always lets perfect be the enemy of the good (SRT in that case),” the researchers write. “Still, few people we speak to completely write RIST off. Most believe it will grow, but none believe it will surpass SRT. Most welcome it if it solves problems for them, but most believe SRT does enough, and that the extra features RIST might provide are not worth the hassle of upgrading.”
SRT, meanwhile, is still viewed as a ‘de facto standard’ by most, according to Rethink.
“In greenfield deployments, SRT adoption is essentially a given these days, and on the equipment side of things, finding a device that does not support SRT is still very difficult. For RTP and RTMP, they will continue to linger, but they are decidedly on the way out, through the period—persisting as legacy options in stubborn workloads.”
Zixi is attempting to stand out in a crowded market, the researcher said.
“Zixi the protocol and Zixi the platform have slightly different perspectives. The platform will delight in pointing to all the multi-protocol traffic it handles, and that it does not view SRT as a direct rival,” Rethink said. “The protocol personified, however, will stress that it is being displaced, and our projections show how Zixi import traffic is declining—with the vast majority of Zixi platform customers using more than one protocol.
“The platform would note that so long as that traffic is arriving inside the Zixi SDVP (Software-Defined Video Platform) environment, Zixi gets paid, and so it is not as torn up over the protocol choice as the Zixi protocol itself might be,” the report concluded.
Rethink was particularly harsh on NDI, noting that its use “has completely fallen off a cliff.”
“For a time, it looked like it could ride a wave of prosumer interest and expand into the tooling via a growing market of content creators entering the market from outside the traditional M&E holdings—bringing with them a decidedly different way of working, which made use of NDI,” Rethink said. “But recent price increases and license-term changes have dented that projection, and in the four years that we have been tracking NDI, the protocol has not made any dents in the likes of SRT or RIST.
"NDI still has its niche uses, in M&E, particularly in graphics workflows and is particularly well positioned as a simpler alternative to the SMPTE ST 2110 ecosystem, as well as the open standard IPMX options and the closed SDVoE alternative," Rethink said.
Rethink also noted the emergence of Media over Quic (aka MOQ), but says it’s still too soon to gauge its future impact.
“There lurks a potential new entrant on the horizon, of course. Media over QUIC (MoQ) has evolved on the distribution side of the market, rather than contribution. However, there is an increasing amount of chatter about using MoQ (using the UDP-based QUIC protocol) thanks to its low-latency capabilities. We are tracking this, but for now, there is no need to include MoQ in the contribution projections.”
The report also acknowledges the increasing influence of software-defined workflows.
“With LLM-based coding and automation, the trend of ‘software-ization’ of video workflows continues apace, further abstracting the choice of protocol from the choice of equipment at any given step in the chain,” Rethink said. “Certain encoders (the appliances) are still constrained but, increasingly, buyers have flexibility about which protocol they wish to use. Increasingly, the ‘value’ is in the interchangeability and programmability of a workflow, rather than in the economies of scale that could be achieved by committing to a single protocol and approach.”
