RIST technology plays key role in Technology & Engineering Emmy®-recognized remote production system

The RIST Forum, an activity group of the Video Services Forum (VSF), congratulates SipRadius on being honored with a Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS). The award, for Web-Based Frame-Accurate Remote Monitoring Systems for Distributed Broadcast Production, is shared by SipRadius, NBCU, Grass Valley, CBS Sports, Disney, Game Creek, Amazon and Vindral, recognizing their contributions to the development and implementation of this technology.

The award recognizes work that addresses one of the fundamental challenges of distributed production: giving production teams secure, reliable and timely access to high-value media regardless of their geographical location.

RIST (Reliable Internet Stream Transport) played an important role in the implementation developed by SipRadius for NBCUniversal. The system was designed to connect major centers and their live content with production teams working from diverse remote locations, using widely available connectivity over the public internet while maintaining the quality and security required for professional broadcast applications.

The implementation used a combination of DRM-enabled WebRTC and the RIST transport layer, providing security, resilience and scalability. Based on open standards, sources were fed using MPEG-TS over RIST to the media server farm, which converted streams to WebRTC for web players while providing transparent passthrough of MPEG-TS to set-top boxes using RIST. This enabled production teams to securely monitor remote video and audio across geographically diverse networks while removing much of the complexity of the underlying network, configuration and management from the user.

“RIST was created to solve exactly this type of challenge: reliably transporting professional media over networks that broadcasters do not control,” said Dr. Ciro Noronha, RIST Forum President. “Seeing RIST form part of an implementation that has now been recognized with a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award is an important moment for everyone who has contributed to the specification and its development. We congratulate SipRadius and all of the recipients on this recognition.”

The underlying requirement was particularly demanding. Production teams increasingly operate remotely from studios and control rooms, while high-value media may need to travel across the public internet or telecommunications networks. This requires the transport to address bandwidth and latency while protecting content against copyright infringement and piracy. RIST was designed specifically for broadcasters to provide data integrity with low latency over public networks.

“We demonstrated that using open RIST transport and COTS hardware, combined with a custom OS and very carefully tuned application software, it is practical to connect users to content regardless of their geographical location,” said Sergio Ammirata Ph.D., SipRadius founder and Chief Scientist. “In the process, we also created a paradigm shift by having every resource available to everyone everywhere.”

The SipRadius team will receive the Emmy at a joint ceremony in Los Angeles on 14 October 2026, hosted by the Television Academy and NATAS.

The winners from SipRadius, NBCU, Grass Valley, CBS Sports, Disney, Game Creek, Amazon and Vindral accept the Emmy for the development of Web-Based Frame-Accurate Remote Monitoring Systems for Distributed Broadcast Production at the 2026 Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards at the Television Academy’s Wolf Theatre in the Saban Media Center on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026 in Los Angeles. (Photo by Willy Sanjuan/Invision for the Television Academy/AP Content Services)