Comparing RIST and SRT to reveal why professional media transport demands engineered resilience.
Sergio Ammirata, Ph.D., Chief Scientist, SipRadius
When you’re sending live media over the internet, reliability isn’t optional. You need seamless delivery with minimal latency – no black screens, no freezes, no reboots mid-broadcast.
Many in the industry began their IP streaming journey with SRT (Secure Reliable Transport). It’s widely adopted, open source, and provides a practical way to move media securely across unmanaged networks. For some applications, that’s enough.
But as remote production and live contribution have scaled, broadcasters have needed more. Greater resilience, more efficient bandwidth use, and interoperability across complex, multi-vendor environments. That’s where RIST (Reliable Internet Stream Transport) comes in.
Developed by experts from across the broadcast industry, RIST builds on the same principles as SRT but extends them to meet the additional demands of large-scale, professional broadcast workflows. It was engineered specifically for real-world media environments where uptime, quality, and security must be guaranteed.
While SRT is limited to a single path, RIST supports redundant routing, including compliance with the SMPTE ST 2022-7 standard. If one path drops, another seamlessly takes over, maintaining the stream without interruption. In live production, can you really afford to be crossing your fingers that a single SRT path will hold?
In packet recovery, RIST also delivers stronger protection. It can withstand up to 55% sustained and 86% short-term packet loss, compared to around 12% in typical SRT setups. That margin can be the difference between staying on air or dropping off completely. When networks falter, SRT’s single-path design leaves no fallback – once congestion begins, it can spiral into failure. RIST’s intelligent retransmission system prevents that cascade by discarding null packets, reducing network strain, and keeping the stream stable even under pressure.
This efficiency means RIST makes better use of the available network capacity. In side-by-side tests, SRT circuits often require up to 50% more data to maintain the same visual quality. That makes RIST not only more stable but also more economical to scale.
Beyond resilience, RIST includes capabilities designed specifically for broadcast: AES-256 encryption, adaptive bitrate control, point-to-multipoint routing, and full interoperability across vendors through the open LibRIST library. Together, these features make it a natural fit for both contribution and distribution workflows.
From remote production to international content exchange, RIST has proven itself as the protocol built for the broadcast environment – robust, secure, and ready for anything the network throws at it.
When every frame matters, RIST ensures it arrives – reliably, securely, and in sync.
At SipRadius, we’ve built on these principles from the start. Our software and hardware solutions use RIST at their core to guarantee secure, ultra-low latency transport across any network – from live event contribution to global content distribution. As contributors to the RIST Forum and developers of the open-source LibRIST library, we continue to refine and expand what’s possible for reliable IP-based media delivery.