Satellite or Internet? Why Even Major Broadcasters Are Coming Down to Earth
The 2022 marked a new milestone for the entire media market. Olympic Broadcasting Services, the host broadcaster organization for the Olympic Games, launched content delivery to distributors via the public Internet — in addition to satellite. All event videos from Beijing were streamed in 4K quality.
It was the most significant event for Olympic broadcasting since 1964: that year the Games were transmitted via satellite for the first time. Today, content delivery over the Internet is the most modern solution for professional production and broadcasting.
In this article, we will explore why professionals only started embracing the internet for data transmission in the 2020s and discuss the role of the SRT protocol in this shift.
Satellite Dishes Held Their Ground Until the Last Moment
It is often considered that the streaming media industry started with the release of RealPlayer in 1995. It allowed users to stream audio and later, video. However, for a long time, the internet was only used to deliver services to end-users, not for professionals.
In the early 2010s, the streaming platform Twitch was launched. Subsequently, YouTube also enabled streaming for its users. Despite the growing popularity of these services, professional broadcasters remained committed to traditional methods. Between studios or to relay points video used to be transmitted over cable or satellite.
For live event broadcasts, TV channels and production companies still chose satellite technologies. Any major event, like a football championship, was surrounded by crowds of people as well as dozens of TV trucks with satellite dishes.
Several factors argued against using the internet for broadcasts at that time:
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Unreliable Connection: Network transmission without delays and data loss was not always and everywhere achievable. The RTMP protocol had a Head of Line blocking issue: one lost data packet could result in several seconds of lost video. Continuity in HLS broadcasting required a video delay of half a minute or more, which was unacceptable for sports broadcasts and live segments.
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TV Standards Requirements: Not all the video codecs were compatible with existing data transmission protocols. Every software and equipment manufacturer released their proprietary solutions, adding complexities to video transmission and post-production.
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Equipment Incompatibility: Sending video from a broadcast point to a studio over the internet required additional equipment. You had to purchase expensive equipment licensed by codec and data transmission protocol creators.
However, within a few years, the situation began to change.
Reliable and affordable internet became the norm. Satellite channels couldn’t compete with the internet in terms of cost and accessibility. Broadcasters and content distributors realized they could reduce costs by implementing the internet transmission and gain market leadership.
The only question was finding the right technologies.
The Emergence of the SRT Protocol in Open Access
By 2013, the most popular solutions for video transmission were the RTMP and HLS protocols.
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RTMP (Real-Time Messaging Protocol): It was developed in 1996 and became a proprietary Adobe protocol. It gained popularity due to its use in Flash Player, Twitch and YouTube. RTMP cannot transmit audio tracks in multiple languages and requires a reliable Internet connection to avoid data loss. Along with codec support limitations, these issues made RTMP unattractive for TV professionals.
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HLS (HTTP Live Streaming): An Apple creation from the 2000s, initially supported only on iOS and MacOS devices. Its key feature was adaptive bitrate streaming, ensuring the best playback quality regardless of internet speed, software, or device performance. HLS streaming had considerable delays of about half a minute or more. That was a major obstacle for live reporting and sports broadcasts on TV over HLS.
American company Haivision proposed a technical solution that changed the market. In 2013, they created the Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) protocol for video transmission based on UDP. Initially, Haivision implemented it on their encoders and decoders. In 2017, the company released the protocol as open-source and founded the “SRT Alliance,” which quickly made the protocol an industry standard. Many major companies supported SRT and joined the Alliance, including YouTube, Sony, Microsoft, and Alibaba Cloud.
Why SRT is the choice for TV content transmission today?
Low Bandwidth Requirements
SRT requires only modest Internet speeds to transmit video at the highest resolution: about 15-20 Mbps. In the case of connection errors, the protocol requests and retransmits only the missing data, making network overload unlikely.
Equipment Compatibility
SRT is codec-agnostic and only handles data transmission. No special knowledge or trained specialists are needed to use it. You just need an encoder, decoder, or comprehensive equipment capable of converting NDI and SDI streams used in TV production. Thanks to the open code, there is plenty of inexpensive equipment in the market.
CBR and VBR Support
In satellite, terrestrial, or cable TV networks, MPEG-TS with constant bitrate (CBR) is used. For OTT and other internet services, a variable bitrate (VBR) is beneficial.
Reliability
SRT minimizes the impact of jitter and fluctuating bandwidth. The protocol uses ARQ (Automatic Repeat reQuest), an intelligent packet retransmission process. This error correction mechanism minimizes the risk of packet loss.
Security
The protocol supports AES-128 and AES-256 bit encryption. This is the standard for high-security systems: intercepting and decrypting such keys is very difficult. Additionally, setting up a backup SRT line is simpler and cheaper than a satellite link.
Stream Continuity
SRT handles streaming video better than its competitor RTMP. If the connection is lost, the video stream stops, and reconnecting can take up to a minute. In the case of packet loss in SRT, only a few frames are lost, while the broadcast continues.
Cost Analysis
Let’s perform a simple exercise and calculate the cost of live streaming an event using the SRT protocol. To be specific, we’ll consider the actual costs of Flussonic solutions.
Imagine you want to provide live coverage of a spacecraft launch to Mars on your website. At the spaceport, you will have 2 cameras positioned to capture from different perspectives, and one more camera to film the presenter near the launch site.
To organize a broadcast via satellite, you would need to send a TV van with an antenna, a driver, an engineer, and pay for the communication channel. Each channel can only transmit one camera signal, therefore you have to use a video switcher. The broadcast from the truck would be sent via satellite to the studio, and then streamed to the website.
For streaming over the internet, there is no need for a TV van. You just connect a server with Flussonic Media Server installed to the internet at the spaceport and connect all cameras to it. Every video can be sent as a separate stream — up to 20-30 streams. That means one media server is sufficient to cover even a large event.
To receive the SRT signal at the studio, you also need Flussonic Media Server — or any other equipment that receives the signal via SRT protocol and streams it to the website.
Two licenses for Flussonic Media Server — one for sending the signal from the event location and one for receiving it at the studio — will cost only $498. An annual subscription for them costs $4980. Moreover, connecting the server doesn’t require a separate engineer or special settings: even a non-professional can handle it.
How to Start Using SRT for Video Transmission
Today, SRT is evolving from a technology solely for live broadcasting into a standard for TV content delivery. It’s a convenient way to overcome the limitations of satellite, such as high cost and limited bandwidth.
SRT is vendor-agnostic thanks to its open-source code and is supported by many free tools. Today SRT is the best option for point-to-point content transmission and an inexpensive alternative to satellite and fiber optics.
Try the Flussonic Media Server, which supports multiple input and output formats and professionally handles any tasks.
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