Haivision, SRT, and AI: How Intelligent Video Transport Is Closing the Gap Between Pro AV and Broadcast
For most of its history, pro AV and broadcast have operated as adjacent industries that occasionally borrowed from each other. AV integrators built meeting rooms and event spaces; broadcast engineers managed live production chains. The infrastructure was different, the protocols were different, and the expectations around reliability were different by an order of magnitude. In 2026, that divide is closing — and Haivision's SRT protocol, amplified by AI-driven network intelligence, is one of the primary reasons why.
What SRT Actually Does — and Why AI Makes It Better
Secure Reliable Transport (SRT), originally developed by Haivision and now an open standard with an Alliance for Video standardization behind it, is a video transport protocol designed to deliver broadcast-quality streams across unpredictable public networks. It uses a combination of forward error correction, packet retransmission, and dynamic bitrate adaptation to maintain stream integrity even when network conditions fluctuate — the kind of behavior that IP networks exhibit constantly in live event environments.
What AI adds to this foundation is predictive adaptation. Rather than reacting to packet loss after it occurs, AI-powered encoders now analyze network telemetry patterns in real time to anticipate congestion events and preemptively adjust encoding parameters. Haivision's Makito ONE platform and its network-adaptive encoding capabilities represent this architecture in practice: the system learns the behavioral profile of a given network path — its typical congestion windows, its latency variance by time of day, its failure modes — and uses that model to optimize stream delivery before the viewer notices a problem.
Live Events, Houses of Worship, and the Enterprise Streaming Use Case
For AV integrators, the practical application landscape is broad. Live event production companies are increasingly expected to deliver simultaneous multi-platform streams — to YouTube, a corporate CDN, a venue's internal IPTV system, and a remote production hub — with broadcast-grade reliability but without a dedicated broadcast infrastructure budget. SRT with AI-adaptive encoding makes that possible on standard IT networking infrastructure.
Corporate AV represents an equally significant opportunity. Hybrid executive briefings, all-hands meetings, and training sessions that need to reach thousands of simultaneous viewers across distributed campuses require the same kind of transport reliability that SRT provides. Integrators who can design and deploy these systems are competing directly with broadcast service companies for enterprise video contracts — and winning.
The Open Standard Advantage
Because SRT is an open protocol with broad manufacturer support — Crestron, Extron, Ross Video, vMix, and dozens of others have integrated it natively — integrators are not locked into a single-vendor ecosystem. Haivision leads in encoder hardware, but the intelligence layer can be applied across a mixed environment. This interoperability is critical for integrators managing multi-vendor AV-over-IP deployments where standardization reduces long-term support complexity.
What This Means for AV Integrators
SRT-based streaming with AI-adaptive transport is no longer a niche capability for broadcast specialists — it's becoming a standard deliverable in enterprise AV, live events, and houses of worship. Integrators who add Haivision platform expertise and SRT design competency to their portfolio can credibly compete for live production and enterprise streaming contracts that historically went to broadcast vendors. The revenue opportunity is real, and the technical barrier to entry is lower than most integrators assume.