Your phone shows four bars and your stream still dies the second you walk under a bridge. One tower, one bad handoff, and the whole broadcast drops. SRTLA exists so that never decides your night.
What SRTLA actually is
SRT is a streaming protocol that recovers lost data and rides out a choppy connection far better than RTMP. That is why the IRL scene moved to it. But SRT still uses one connection. Lose that connection and you lose the stream.
SRTLA is the bonded version. It spreads one stream across every connection your encoder has at the same time. Two SIMs, a third modem, the cafe Wi-Fi, all carrying part of it. A relay on the other end catches all the pieces and joins them back into one clean stream.
Bonding is not "switch to a backup when the main one dies." Every connection carries part of the load, all the time.
How it behaves in the field
Your encoder and the relay keep an eye on every connection. When one modem gets congested or you move between towers, SRTLA leans on the connections that are still healthy and keeps going. Your viewers see nothing.
- One SIM dies under a bridge. The other two carry the stream.
- You walk out of a packed arena (dead signal) toward the exit. It rebalances as coverage comes back.
- A modem drops completely. The stream rides the ones that are left instead of ending.
Bonding is a floor, not a magic ceiling
Bonding raises your reliability floor. It cannot invent bandwidth that is not there. If every connection is maxed out at once, your encoder lowers its bitrate to keep moving, and NOALBS switches your OBS to a holding scene so viewers see something on purpose instead of a frozen feed.
SRTLA vs SRT vs RTMP
| RTMP | SRT | SRTLA | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Connections used | 1 | 1 | many, at once |
| Recovers lost data | no | yes | yes |
| Survives a dead modem | no | no | yes |
| Needs a relay | no | optional | yes |
| Right for IRL | rarely | one connection | bonded field rig |
If you stream from a backpack on cellular, SRTLA is the answer. The full protocol breakdown is in SRTLA vs RTMP.
What the relay does
SRTLA only works if a relay is catching all the pieces. The relay joins them back into one clean feed, and you pull that feed into your own OBS as a media source. OBS is what you actually broadcast to Twitch or Kick from.
Two things make our relay worth pointing at. It runs custom SRTLA tuning instead of the plain open source defaults, and it runs on global servers (Singapore, the US, the EU, and Scandinavia) with unlimited bandwidth, so you connect to one near wherever you are.
Why the basic open source version is only half the story
The free open source SRTLA works. It is also bare-bones, and everyone runs it with the same default settings.
Our relay is tuned, closer to what official Belabox cloud does than to the plain version. That tuning is the part that decides whether a rough connection stutters or holds smoothly. That, plus being one of the only options besides official Belabox cloud with a real way to remote control a Belabox, is why people move their rig over and stop thinking about it.
Getting started
- Pick an encoder that speaks SRTLA: a Belabox, a bonding box, or a phone app like Moblin (iPhone) or IRL Pro (Android) running more than one modem.
- Point it at an SRTLA relay in the region nearest you.
- Pull the relay into your own OBS as a media source, and run NOALBS so OBS switches between your LIVE, LOW, and BRB scenes on its own when the feed changes.
FAQ
- Is SRTLA the same as SRT?
- No. SRT uses one connection. SRTLA spreads that same stream across several connections at once and joins them back together at the relay. SRTLA needs a relay on the other end. Plain SRT does not.
- Do I need a special device to use SRTLA?
- You need something that speaks SRTLA on your side: a Belabox, a bonding box, or a phone app like Moblin or IRL Pro running more than one modem. The relay handles the other end.
- How many modems can SRTLA bond?
- As many as your encoder has. Most field rigs run two to four SIMs plus Wi-Fi. SRTLA uses every connection you give it and leans on whichever ones are healthy.