Developers · Protocol

An open protocol for iPhone video — build your own receiver.

The wire protocol that carries Airlive's video, camera control and tally is public, documented, and Apache-2.0 licensed. If our receivers don't fit your workflow, write one that does.

Airlive team 4 min read

Why we opened it

A camera is only as useful as the things that can receive it. We'd rather grow the set of receivers than gate it: our own tools — Bridge and the OBS plugins — speak the same protocol anyone else can implement. No SDK to license, no lock-in, no reverse-engineering. If Airlive-the-company disappeared tomorrow, the protocol wouldn't.

What's in the spec

  1. Discovery — receivers announce themselves over Bonjour (service type _airlive._tcp); phones list them by name. No IP addresses in the UX.
  2. Video — the camera's feed streams to the receiver over a local TCP connection.
  3. Control & tally — a control channel runs alongside the video: the receiver can push camera settings (exposure, lens, white balance) and tally state back to the phone.

The airlive-protocol repo holds the spec — the README walks the handshake and packet layout, and the repo is the source of truth when this post and the spec disagree.

A receiver in an evening

The minimal loop is small enough for a weekend hack, in any language with sockets:

  1. Advertise _airlive._tcp via Bonjour so phones can find you.
  2. Accept the TCP connection when a phone picks you.
  3. Parse the stream per the spec and hand frames to your pipeline — render them, record them, feed them to vision code.
  4. Optionally, send control messages back: flip the tally, adjust exposure, switch lenses.
$ ./my-receiver
bonjour  advertising _airlive._tcp as "My Receiver"
conn     iPhone "Studio A" connected
video    receiving frames…
ctrl     tally → ON AIR

What people could build

  1. A Windows or Linux receiver — the gap we haven't filled ourselves yet.
  2. Hardware tally boxes — the control channel is right there.
  3. Ingest into your own switcher / media server, with camera control in your UI.
  4. Robotics and vision rigs — an iPhone is a great sensor with a great radio.

License

Apache-2.0 — permissive, patent-granting, commercial use welcome. The receivers we ship are open too: everything lives under github.com/airlive-project.

Related guides

All articles