No products in the cart.
What is RTMP Ingest and Why is it Important for Live Streaming?
Live video streaming has become a vital tool for organizations of all shapes and sizes. Streaming video using professional-grade platforms and online video players has the tools that enable professional broadcasts with little technical know-how.
Plenty of technical mechanisms run in the background to make this work. Different protocols and systems are working together that bring video content and live video streams to life. Real-time messaging protocol (RTMP) is one of these protocols. The RTMP protocol is a protocol that enables affordable live streaming. Today, RTMP ingest allows users to take advantage of many low-cost and open-source live encoders that are available.
In this article, we cover what exactly RTMP ingest is and why it’s crucial for live-streaming events today. We begin by reviewing the RTMP protocol and dispelling myths surrounding what it is and what it does. Furthermore, we explain RTMP ingest and how it differs from an RTMP stream. Finally, we conclude with an introduction and discussion on HLS, another related protocol and how RTMP ingest works with Mslive stream.
What is RTMP?
RTMP, which is short for “Real-Time Messenger Protocol” is an online video protocol that has played several roles throughout the history of online video streaming.
It was created by Macromedia, which was purchased by Adobe, to distribute video, audio, and other media files for advertising. RTMP was originally designed for streaming with Adobe’s Flash player and is often simply called Flash streaming, but this use is now quite outdated.
Today, RTMP ingest is the most common use of this protocol and has to do exclusively with the exchange between an encoder and an online video platform.
In addition to the standard version of RTMP, there are several variations of the protocol, including RTMPS, RTMPE, RTMPT, and RTMFP. These variations all have slightly different purposes in live streaming.
Is RTMP (Flash) Dead?
As we mentioned, the purpose of RTMP in live streaming has changed over time. The “old” use of RTMP is practically dead. Pretty much anything involving RTMP delivery/streaming and Adobe Flash Player delivery/streaming is obsolete at this point with most web browsers completely dropping support of RTMP delivery in 2021.
However, RTMP is not dead. It is alive and well in the form of RTMP ingest where low-cost encoders and the convenience of not having to use a specific IP address for the encoders mean that the protocol is still very valuable for live streaming. RTMP is a very valuable streaming ingest tool.
Even though RTMP has found a new role in live streaming that is currently working well, it will likely be phased out eventually once more powerful technology has been developed. This is not to say that there is anything inherently wrong with RTMP, but that is simply the nature of technology. RTMP streaming ingest is a valuable tool right now, that is likely to be phased out over time.
