RIST Deployments around the world
In 2017, at that year’s VidTrans conference a regional gathering of members of the Video Services Forum (VSF), a new protocol for delivering audio and video over lossy IP networks (including the public Internet), was born. It was an idea that many had been skeptical of, since the open Internet brought with it all kinds of quality, security, latency and reliability issues.
Proponents argued that the benefits of reduced cost by using COTS hardware and avoiding renting expensive private network bandwidth (via H.264 and H.265 compression) to deliver live streams for sporting and corporate events, outweighed the negatives. Another advantage is that it is agnostic to bit rate or resolution formats. A broadcaster could send HD video one day and 4K video the next over the same networked system architecture. So quality was not an issue either…