Elecard's SRT Sniffing Pinpoints Stream Failures Across Delivery Chain

For streaming operators, Elecard's SRT sniffing means diagnosing delivery-chain failures without adding monitoring overhead or creating separate sessions that could themselves introduce latency. The distributed probe architecture directly addresses the multi-vendor blame problem Jachetta highlights — when encoder manufacturers, CDNs, and ISPs each point fingers, probe data pinpoints the exact IP address and workflow segment where packet loss, routing anomalies, or latency originated. Watch whether broadcasters adopt non-intrusive SRT monitoring as a standard operational requirement, particularly for remote production and global contribution feeds where routing transparency is limited.

Elecard's SRT sniffing capability shipped in Boro 2.2, the company's monitoring platform, with the latest probe build (version 2.2.7) dated September 30, 2025, per Elecard's Boro release notes. The technical implementation, detailed in an Elecard explainer page, uses PCAP-based packet capture in promiscuous mode on network adapters, relying on port mirroring (SPAN) to duplicate traffic to the probe. The probe identifies SRT packets by checking Socket ID fields and counter patterns in unencrypted headers, then reconstructs the transport stream for standard QoS and QoE analysis, including TR 101 290 compliance checks. Encrypted streams require the probe to capture handshake control packets at session establishment to obtain key material.

The launch comes as SRT reaches near-ubiquity in live streaming infrastructure. The SRT Alliance, founded by Haivision in 2017, now counts over 700 member organizations, per the Alliance's website. In April 2026, Synamedia announced that Globo, Latin America's largest commercial media group, transitioned its entire primary content distribution to SRT over a managed IP backbone — a deployment that underscores the protocol's move beyond contribution into primary distribution. Microsoft announced SRT support for Teams town halls and live events starting June 2026, per Microsoft's M365 admin documentation published May 27, 2026, bringing the protocol into enterprise collaboration workflows. In February 2026, Dacast launched SRT ingest and joined the SRT Alliance, citing customer demand for reliable contribution over unpredictable networks.

Elecard faces competition in the SRT monitoring space. Dualz offers SMART SRT monitoring with multiviewer capabilities for broadcast NOCs, while Callaba published a browser-based SRT multiview approach in 2026 aimed at cloud-native remote production workflows. Eyevinn maintains an open-source SRT monitor on GitHub that provides basic WebRTC-based preview. However, Elecard's non-intrusive sniffing approach — which avoids creating a second session that could double traffic or add latency — differentiates it from solutions that require active stream participation.