Media Ingestion protocols Review
This post summaries the most relevant protocols using for media ingestion. In these media ingestion flows a client that is broadcasting some content sends it to an endpoint (typically a server) that will re-format it for distribution to a potentially large audience, using a different protocol optimised for media playback. The following sections show the main ideas behind each protocol as well as some of their advantages and disadvantages. The protocols are organised into three buckets (tradicional protocols, modern protocols and next generation protocols) that correspond to three waves of protocols with the first one based on TCP, the second one on UDP or HTTP and the third one with QUIC. You can see a summary of those characteristics as well as the timeline and adoption in the following diagram. Traditional protocols RTMP RTMP (Real-Time Messaging Protocol) is the most widely used protocol for media ingestion nowadays. It was developed more than 20y ago and popularised by Ado