Bringing Full Protection to the Cloud Through Lossless UDP

April 2025

swXtch.io addresses the data packet loss associated with UDP traffic.

swXtch.io’s Lossless UDP was developed to meet the challenges of modern ground+cloud workflows, the architecture of which faces many opportunities for packet-loss. The practice of on-air protection through system redundancy has been fundamental to broadcast operations for decades. The introduction of the IP transport layer signaled that the “simpler times” of failing over to backup transmitters and secondary master control feeds were about to change. While configuring SDI redundant paths required a healthy degree of broadcast engineering expertise, the results were largely consistent. Moving broadcast content over IP networks proved a far more delicate process given the inherently inconsistent characteristics and behaviors of IP networks.

Redundancy & Protection in IP Networks

At the most basic level, IP networks move video (and audio) between points in the form of bits that are packetized within data streams. As those streams move across IP networks, packet drops are a common occurrence. The greater the amount of packet loss, the greater the likelihood of noticeable loss at the receive point. If that receive point takes the signal live to air, the resulting hit to signal quality will impact the quality of experience that could quickly lead to viewer churn.

Redundancy for IP networks quickly took on new meaning, and it wasn’t long before phrases such as “forward error correction” (FEC) and “hitless protection” entered the broadcast lexicon. These techniques were adopted to increase the likelihood that streams arrived at their receive points intact. Hitless protection raised the bar by moving two redundant streams over the network; as packets from the primary stream dropped, they were replaced with packets from the secondary stream. The process essentially repaired streams while in transit, assuring optimal signal integrity and therefore maintaining viewer experience.

Redundancy for IP networks soon evolved into moving two or more streams in parallel across separate networks. That spirit is today represented in the SMPTE 2022-7 standard, which elevates the results of stream reconstruction through advanced techniques such as packet-level switching. Switching at the packet level produces a continuous stream thanks to automatic switching between sources.

That is precisely what “seamless protection switching,” the method that defines SMPTE 2022-7, entails. In addition to sending redundant video streams over two or more network paths, that packet-level switching at the core of SMPTE ST 2022-7 creates seamless transitions when switching between primary and backup paths. The result is uninterrupted video delivery without any noticeable impact to the integrity or the stream or quality of experience.

Keep It In Motion

               Just as IP networks, video and audio content move into and through the cloud in the form of packetized data streams. The possibilities of what can be achieved in the cloud – and at what scale – are fundamentally different given that moving into the cloud means moving into a virtualized environment. The SMPTE ST 2110 standard essentially specifies how SDI video content is prepared and moved over IP networks. IP networks, by definition, are on-prem networks; therefore, a broadcaster’s on-prem network can be SDI, SDI/IP hybrid, or pure ST 2110 IP. 

swXtch.io specifically developed cloudSwXtch to help broadcasters manage their live production workflows at a far grander scale. The elasticity of the cloud itself provides an opportunity to work with larger volumes of video content, and its agile networking infrastructure extends the broadcaster’s reach. Cloud networking’s use of virtualized infrastructure opens infinite possibilities to move content to many more end points and in a far more dynamic manner.

With that exceptional scale comes greater responsibility for managing that content as it moves through the cloud. Those responsibilities also require more specialized set of tools than what public clouds have traditionally offered. Those tools, which include ST 2022-7 seamless protection switching, have long served important functions within the broadcaster’s on-prem broadcast infrastructure.

cloudSwXtch deploys as a virtual overlay network that rests just above public cloud networks. One of its core functions is to provide a direct bridge for broadcasters to seamlessly migrate high-volume media workloads from on-prem studios to cloud networks. cloudSwXtch offers broadcasters several pathways for moving these live production workflows into the cloud, including via ST 2110 uncompressed or JPEG-XS compressed flows – the latter of which affords broadcasters the dual benefit of increasing channel counts without any noticeable signal quality degradation. By design, JPEG-XS offers a “visually lossless” quality of experience that vis analogous to an uncompressed workflow.

There is another “lossless” tool in the cloudSwXtch toolset that may perhaps have the most important impact on the overall experience. That tool, Lossless UDP, is now one of the core features that comes standard within cloudSwXtch, along with multicast, protocol fanout (for multipoint delivery), and ST 2022-7 seamless protection switching.

Like ST 2022-7, Lossless UDP ensures signal integrity by actively managing the retransmission of lost data packets as video content moves through the cloud. It can be used with or separate from ST 2022-7 in alignment with the user’s intentions. Despite roughly serving the same service as seamless protection switching, it does in fact serve a different purpose.

Separation of Network and Application

UDP is an acronym for User Datagram Protocol, one of several common protocols used to move data packets over IP networks. In Lossless UDP deployments, the application layer of the UDP protocol initiates the retransmission of lost packets. By nature of how cloudSwXtch rests atop of the cloud netwo

rk, the inclusion of Lossless UDP in its virtual overlay network architecture separates it from the network layer of the public clouds.

Such separation is critical to achieving very high packet rates as live production workflows move through the cloud. For one, the processing load is removed from the network layer; in the event of poor network conditions, lossless UDP performance remains consistent. The retransmission of lost packets continues automatically without interruption as missing packets are detected, ensuring that the integrity of data and media workloads is maintained across all links.

That last point is especially notable as Lossless UDP protects media streams at perhaps their most critical junctures. Lossless UDP optimizes packet delivery for high-bandwidth streams as they move into (ground-to-cloud), off (cloud-to-ground) and in between public cloud networks. The latter is valuable for live production workflows that simultaneously move across multiple public clouds.

swXtch.io’s Lossless UDP ensures minimal latency – like the low latency of JPEG-XS lossless compression – retaining the promise of real-time delivery for even the most globally reaching live broadcasts. The combined strength of Lossless UDP and JPEG-XS in the cloud will far surpass the performance of what can be achieved using SRT, ZIXI, or similar codecs for IP or cloud media transport. Likewise, Lossless UDP can be deployed alongside other applications available to that cloudSwXtch users, including live, broadcast-quality standards conversion with Cinnafilm’s Tachyon Live cloudSwXtch feature. 

Only cloudSwXtch offers these high-value performance benefits to the broadcast, media and entertainment community, along with countless others that you simply won’t otherwise find within public cloud networks. We invite you to schedule a meeting with us to learn more. Reach out to us here to schedule a meeting.