streamair

StreamAir is a cloud-based streaming platform and protocol designed to deliver low-latency audio and video over the internet. It offers a transport protocol, edge-enabled delivery, and client SDKs that cater to live broadcasting, interactive media, and remote production workflows. The platform emphasizes sub-second end-to-end latency under typical conditions, adaptive bitrate for fluctuating networks, end-to-end encryption, and integrated telemetry for quality monitoring.

Development began in 2018 as a collaboration among researchers and engineers seeking alternatives to conventional streaming stacks. The first open-source reference implementation was released in 2020, followed by a commercial cloud service offering ingest, transcoding, and global delivery with regional edge nodes in 2021. By 2023, several media teams and esports organizations reported pilot deployments to reduce latency and improve interactivity.

StreamAir operates with a UDP-based transport layer inspired by modern low-latency protocols, combined with application-layer control for adaptive streaming. It uses dynamic routing, edge caching, and selective retransmission to cope with packet loss. Security is provided by end-to-end encryption and secure key exchange. The platform includes SDKs for web, mobile, and native apps and provides APIs for event-based signaling, chat, and scene changes in live productions.

Key features include low latency, adaptive bitrate, secure transport, multi-peer collaboration, server-side recording, and a modular pipeline for ingest, transcoding, and delivery. The ecosystem supports plug-ins for analytics, moderation, and interactive overlays.

StreamAir has seen use in broadcast and esports pilots and is often discussed in industry forums as a potential competitor to established streaming stacks. Proponents highlight latency and control; critics point to the complexity of implementation and the cost of edge delivery at scale.