RTMP is an old protocol, owned by Adobe and tightly bound to Flash technology from the very beginning of its existence. Even though Flash has been deprecated after dominating over the content rich web for many years, RTMP is still alive. It is due to the fact that RTMP supports so-called publishing when a live media stream is pushed by a client to a server for further distribution. Many modern protocols lack this publishing feature.
Starting from the Flash days, existing server infrastructure still uses RTMP and will be using it for a long time. YouTube, Facebook, Twitch - you name it, all of them use RTMP ingestion for live streams. If a future app is expected to provide their user with a feature of publishing video streams in social networks, it should use RTMP. Therefore, investing into a RTMP library is not a waste of money but quite the opposite. In fact, it guarantees the compatibility with most popular content distribution networks.
VASTreaming RTMP library for iOS provides the ability to publish a live stream to RTMP server, pull and watch a stream from RTMP server as well as run a tiny RTMP server with the ability to ingest published streams and re-distribute streams to connected clients. See RTMP library page for more details about the protocol itself as well as our implementation details and specifics.
