Real-Time Streaming Protocol
computer network protocol
The Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) is an application-level network protocol designed for multiplexing and packetizing multimedia transport streams (such as interactive media, video and audio) over a suitable transport protocol.
RTSP is used in entertainment and communications systems to control streaming media servers.
The protocol is used for establishing and controlling media sessions between endpoints.
Clients of media servers issue commands such as play, record and pause to facilitate real-time control of the media streaming from the server to a client (video on demand) or from a client to the server (voice recording).
History
RTSP was developed by RealNetworks, Netscape and Columbia University.
The first draft of the protocol was submitted to IETF in October 1996 by Netscape and Progressive Networks, after which Henning Schulzrinne from Columbia University submitted "RTSP՚" ("RTSP prime") in December 1996.
The two drafts were merged for standardization by the Multiparty Multimedia Session Control Working Group (MMUSIC WG) of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and further drafts were published by the working group.
RTSP was published as RFC 2326 in 1998.
RTSP 2.0 was published as RFC 7826 in 2016 as a replacement of RTSP 1.0. Version 2.0 is based on version 1.0 but is not backwards compatible (other than in the basic version negotiation mechanism).
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This entry incorporates text from “Real-Time Streaming Protocol” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.