WHIP stands for WebRTC-HTTP Ingestion Protocol and is an emerging specification to get WebRTC into live streaming. More specifically, it defines a signaling protocol for WebRTC.
As noted by Tsahi in his article on BlogGeek.me:
"WebRTC explicitly decided NOT to have any signaling protocol so that developers will be able to pick and choose any existing signaling protocol of their choice – be it SIP, XMPP or any other alternative. For the media streaming industry, this wasn’t a good thing – they needed a well known protocol with ready-made implementations. Which led to WHIP and WHEP."
Phenix has recently expanded its ingest options by incorporating support for WHIP. This means that WebRTC producers, such as OBS, can now seamlessly publish their WebRTC content to the Phenix platform.
With both the WHIP Endpoint and the Media Server hosted on Phenix's self-healing high availability infrastructure with more Points of Presence than any other video streaming partner out there, the entire process of ingesting the content and delivering it to global audiences with <1/2 second latency just got a whole lot easier.
While our testing hasn't revealed a consistent advantage of WHIP ingest over other supported protocols like RTMP, there are specific scenarios where WHIP can shine. For instance, if a content source is optimized for WHIP, if WHIP is the sole protocol supported by the source, or if there are non-technical factors favoring WHIP (like its really cool acronym), then it becomes the preferred protocol.
The addition of WHIP support significantly enhances the interoperability of WebRTC-based systems. To determine the most suitable protocol for your specific use case, contact us for personalized assistance.