How it compares
open·broadcast provides the contribution capability of a broadcast transport platform — bonded uplinks, multi-path resilience, multi-destination fan-out — at the price and access model of a small-operator relay service, free to self-host under AGPL-3.0.
Competitor entries are what each vendor states about its own product, paraphrased and attributed, checked against their public product pages on 13 November 2026. They are not benchmarks we ran. If a vendor changes its product, this page can be wrong — tell us and we will correct it.
Capability
The comparison below is on transport and delivery mechanics, not on price or company size. The rows are what decides whether a bonded field feed reaches its destinations intact.
| Platform | Transport | Bonding | Fan-out | Hardware |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| open·broadcastAGPL-3.0 · self-hostable | RIST — open standard (VSF) | Bonded legs on one port, per-leg weights adjusted automatically from measured capacity, RTT and retransmits | Receiver fan-out to RTMP/RTMPS/SRT/RIST, copy-only, no re-encode | None — commodity x86 |
| ZixiProprietary | Zixi Broadcaster, protocol-agnostic ingest and delivery | Zixi describes "patented hitless failover, congestion-aware recovery, and multi-path bonding" | Yes, with orchestration and blackout/market switching via ZEN Master | Software, cloud or on-premises |
| HaivisionProprietary | SRT, with protocol conversion in SRT Gateway | Path Redundancy in SRT Gateway | Stream replication, transcode and record | Appliance or virtual appliance |
| LiveUProprietary | LRT, LiveU's own transport protocol | Bonding across cellular, Wi-Fi and satellite; LU800 bonds up to 14 links | LiveU Matrix for cloud distribution | Field units required (LU-series, Solo) |
| DejeroProprietary | Dejero's own transport | Smart Blending Technology across multiple networks; TITAN routers add triple 5G | WayPoint receivers and CuePoint return servers | Transmitters and routers required (EnGo, GateWay, TITAN) |
| PeplinkProprietary | None — operates beneath the stream | SpeedFusion: packet-level bonding of WAN links, with WAN smoothing and hot failover | Not applicable — it bonds the network, not the video | Router required |
Features
The capability table above covers how a feed is carried. This one covers what you get around the feed — the things an operator notices on a bad day rather than a good one.
| Feature | open·broadcast | Zixi | Haivision | LiveU | Dejero | IRL relay services |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bonded uplinks | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Fan-out to several destinations | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Standby slate when the feed drops | Yes, up to 30 min | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Branded slate, per session | Yes | No | No | No | No | No |
| Per-destination transcode | Yes, opt-in | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Varies |
| Open source | Yes, AGPL-3.0 | No | No | No | No | No |
| Self-host option | Yes | No | No | No | No | No |
| Hardware you must buy | None | None | Appliance or VM | Field units | Transmitters and routers | None |
The slate, specifically
A platform ends the stream when the incoming connection stops, and ending the stream closes the recording. An encoder that drops for a minute therefore costs you the broadcast, and restarting it leaves a second video for the same event.
The receiver keeps the destination connection open instead. While the encoder's feed is absent it sends a standby slate — your brand image if the session has one, plain otherwise — for up to 30 minutes. The stream is not auto-stopped, and when your encoder comes back the same broadcast continues.
The result is one video per event rather than one per dropout, and no stream ending underneath you while you fix the encoder.
Why not just self-host?
Because the software is AGPL-3.0, self-hosting is an alternative to the hosted service. The difference is who carries the operational load.
| Self-hosted | Hosted | |
|---|---|---|
| Who runs the relay | You, on your VPS | Us, in Australia |
| Egress cost | Yours, at your provider's rate | Included up to the plan allowance |
| Upgrades | You pull and redeploy | We deploy |
| When it breaks mid-stream | You debug it, live | You have someone to escalate to |
| Support | Community, on GitHub | Direct |
| Right for | Engineers who want full control and will run it properly | Operators who want the stream to be someone else's problem |
Where the claims come from
Transport, bonding and hardware rows for Zixi, Haivision, LiveU, Dejero and Peplink are paraphrased from each vendor's public product pages and checked on 13 November 2026. Quoted phrases are the vendors' own wording. The open·broadcast row describes what this software does today, including its limits.
We do not publish a price comparison against other services. Their pricing is quote-based or changes without notice, and a stale figure about another business would be neither fair nor accurate.