The professional media industry – AV, events, corporate and digital out of home as well as broadcast – is set firmly on a path of IP connectivity, using the public internet to connect venues, destinations and production centers. The advantages of accessibility and scalability make it an obvious choice. 

But as more and more productions use remote connectivity, and the scope of these productions becomes more extensive – more cameras, sources and return feeds; multiple locations – so the demand for bandwidth grows and the challenges escalate, while the need remains for “broadcast standards” of five nines or better reliability. 
It is also vital to bear in mind that, as the use of tunnelled streams on the public internet for professional media grows, so it becomes ever-more attractive to those who seek to profit from cyber-crime. Ransomware is an existential threat for live television. It is also important to consider that state actors might want to interrupt signals for their own interests and to protect their own world view. 

The goal is to have a means by which circuits can be quickly and easily established, linking anywhere to anywhere via the internet. These circuits must provide the capability of high quality transmission within the bandwidth available, with minimal latency and high resilience to circuit disruptions. Finally, they must be hardened to any cyber attack. 

This paper will demonstrate that RIST is the only tunnelling technology at present available to deliver against these requirements. It will also show emerging technologies that facilitate the auto-registrations of these end points. 
It is fully interoperable with open and published standards, and it supports redundant routing, which together with SMPTE ST 2022-7 provides for seamless switching between alternate paths. The result is that RIST circuits can survive as much as 55% sustained and 86% short-term packet loss. 

It is codec agnostic, so users are free to choose based on their requirements, including the emerging high throughput JPEG 2000 (HTJ2K) and AV1 patent and royalty free codecs. It uses MPEG-TS as the transport stream, so can be implemented on any current architecture, while taking advantage of advanced features like null packet suppression and program selection to maximize transmission efficiency.. Automatic encoder bitrate management provides for dynamic adjustments based on realtime network characteristics. 

Finally, it is end-to-end encrypted to military standards, and can pass through intermediate nodes without decryption, eliminating points of risk. RIST meets all the demands of the modern media network.