What is SRT?
You want your stream to survive a shaky connection instead of falling over the moment your signal dips. SRT is the protocol that makes that possible, and it is what Super Simple IRL streams over by default. Here is what it is, in plain English.
The short version
SRT is a modern way of sending a live stream that is built to survive a wobbly connection. When you stream from out in the world, your signal is never perfect, so little pieces of your video sometimes go missing on the way. SRT notices and re-sends them fast enough that your viewers never see a problem.
The problem it solves
Older streaming methods assume a steady connection. Send the video, it arrives, done. That works beautifully on home broadband.
Out in the real world it falls apart. You walk behind a building, through a crowd, or into a dead spot, and for a second your signal dips. Pieces of your stream go missing, and a protocol with no recovery just lets the stream stutter or drop.
SRT was designed for exactly this. It expects the connection to be imperfect and plans around it.
How it holds up, briefly
- It re-sends what goes missing. If a few pieces are lost, SRT quietly requests them again, within a short time window, so the full picture still arrives.
- It tolerates a changing signal as you move between cell towers, buildings and dead spots.
- It keeps the delay low and steady, which matters when you are chatting with a live audience.
You never manage any of this. You just notice that your stream stays up in places it used to fall over.
A simple example
Imagine reading a letter to someone over a crackly phone line. Every so often a word gets lost in the crackle. With an older method, you just carry on and they miss that word. With SRT, the moment a word is lost, it gets repeated so quickly that the listener hears the whole sentence anyway.
That is SRT: it fills in the gaps before they become a problem.
The one thing to know next
SRT streams over a single connection. It is reliable, but if that one connection struggles badly, the stream struggles with it. The fix is bonding: spreading your stream across several connections at once, so if one drops, the others keep you live. SRTLA (SRT Link Aggregation) is the older, off-the-shelf way to do this. Super Simple IRL does not use it. We built our own transport, SSTL, from scratch instead, and it recovers from sudden packet loss faster and does more.
Read what is SRTLA next, or see the difference between RTMP, SRT and SRTLA for all three side by side.
Frequently asked questions
What is SRT in simple terms?
SRT is a modern way of sending a live stream that can cope with a shaky connection. If a few pieces of your video go missing, SRT quietly re-sends them, so the stream still arrives clean. That is what makes it great for streaming over mobile data while you are out and about.
What does SRT stand for?
Secure Reliable Transport. The word to focus on is reliable. It was built to stay reliable on the kind of unstable connections that break older protocols.
When should I use SRT instead of RTMP?
Use SRT whenever your connection is not rock solid, which for IRL streaming is almost always. On mobile data, walking around, or anywhere the signal comes and goes, SRT holds up where RTMP drops.
Is SRT hard to set up?
Not with Super Simple IRL. Pick your destination and bitrate in the app and go live; SSIRL's managed cloud receives the stream and sends it on to your platform. You do not need to understand the protocol to use it.