Q&A: RIST Member, Caritech Solutions

The RIST (Reliable Internet Stream Transport) Forum exists to drive the adoption of RIST, an interoperable specification for transporting live video over unmanaged networks such as the Internet.

This ‘Meet our Members’ blog series shines a spotlight on individual RIST members, exploring why they chose to join RIST and how they are actively using the RIST specifications. In this latest installment, we talk to Richard Rawlins, CEO at Caritech Solutions to get his take on current industry trends, and to find out how he is using RIST and see what impact it has had.

Company Profile: Caritech Solutions

Caritech Solutions is a registered ISP, networking and telecommunications company, based in Barbados. It’s part of a consortium, Coop Cable Inc, a small Caribbean television and media services company, that includes Riveting Media Inc., Co-op Energy, and the Cooperative Investment Fund. It provides DTH satellite technology, IPTV, and OTT streaming services across several Caribbean territories, focusing on reliable broadcast engineering and video streaming infrastructure to serve local communities.

What major trend or change do you see that the broadcast industry is currently facing?

From a content distribution standpoint, particularly for paid TV services like ours, piracy is the number one challenge. This drives the need to make systems more cost-effective to deploy in order to compete. Another major challenge is the requirement to be extremely reliable – pirate services are cheap, but you get what you pay for. As legitimate operators, we need to set a high bar to justify why we may cost a bit more. We simply can't afford to have outages or delivery issues because the market won't accept it.

The current trend seems to be moving towards just a few major broadcasters controlling the majority of the market. Smaller operators like us need to evolve or we will go out of business. We need to think outside of the traditional box of "this is how it has always been done" and think bigger, be braver, and not be afraid to step into uncharted waters. We don't need to always follow what the big operators are doing - we can also be trend setters.

Why did you decide to implement RIST?

We decided to adopt RIST for a few key reasons. First, we needed to reduce our operational costs - our previous method of achieving reliable delivery was incrementally costly. Second, we are a solutions company based on the foundational principle of evolution, so we are always trying new technologies and approaches to improve our services.

Initially, it was mostly the open standard nature that attracted us to RIST. However, after bench testing and putting it through real-life conditions, its performance and stability far exceeded anything we had tested so far.

How did you begin using RIST initially?

We began implementing RIST in our production systems in January 2024, mainly for our commercial offerings where we needed a secure and reliable way to deliver content via networks not controlled by us. We did this by integrating libRIST into our end-to-end workflow through building our own RIST gateway. This allowed us to distribute our content while gaining significant feedback and statistics on how our links were performing, providing valuable insights into our clients' services.

Implementing RIST has enabled us to significantly reduce our operational costs compared to our previous methods while actually improving reliability and performance. The technology allowed us to maintain consistent service quality across varying Internet infrastructure conditions, helping us to compete effectively.

Tell us about your implementation of TR-06-44 Part 7 RIST Satellite Hybrid: In-Band Method

Following the successful adoption of RIST into our production systems, we have since also implemented TR-06-4 Part 7 RIST Satellite-Hybrid: In-Band Method to support our DTH Ku-band service, enabling missing packets lost during satellite transmission to be recovered over the Internet. This was of interest to us because as a provider of a DTH Ku-band service in Barbados, where short but very heavy rainfall is common, rain fade presents a significant issue for service delivery. While there are other more traditional solutions available to mitigate rain fade, they are often impractical, very expensive or not completely reliable.

Working closely with SipRadius, we developed a hybrid delivery system built around TR-06-4 Part 7 RIST Satellite-Hybrid: In-Band Method. During normal operation when there are no weather events, receivers pull content from the satellite, then when rain fade affects the signal, receivers automatically detect missing packets, and the system will then request only the specific missing RTP sequence numbers from our Internet recovery service. Once the satellite has returned to a stable condition (user definable), receivers will return to satellite as the main source of the feed. The beauty of this is its simplicity, and the fact that the viewer’s experience is not interrupted in any way. The deployment was highly successful, demonstrating the efficacy and simplicity of the TR-06-4 Part 7 RIST Satellite-Hybrid: In-Band Method specification.

Why do you think collaborative initiatives such as RIST are important?

Collaborative industry initiatives like RIST are essential because they level the playing field for smaller operators like us. Open standards prevent vendor lock-in and reduce costs, making advanced broadcast technologies accessible to companies that can't afford proprietary solutions. This democratization of technology fosters innovation and competition, ultimately benefiting the entire industry and end consumers. Without these collaborative efforts, only the largest operators would have access to cutting-edge solutions, stifling innovation and limiting consumer choice.

For more information about becoming a member of the RIST Forum, go to:https://www.rist.tv/members