Five years ago this week… RIST Forum President Dr. Ciro Noronha shocked attendees during a Covid-era Faultline webinar by backing a merger with the SRT Alliance, proposing a unified “SRT 2.0” protocol for low-latency video transport over unpredictable networks. While Noronha saw convergence as inevitable and beneficial, SRT co-founders Haivision and Wowza offered cooler responses, downplaying alignment. At the time, RIST was closing the feature gap with SRT—adding encryption and releasing open source tools—fueling hopes for interoperability. Yet despite growing industry fatigue with fragmentation, the great protocol unification never came, as vendor pragmatism kept SRT and RIST on parallel tracks. White House seethes over EU tech fines: The US is fuming after Apple and Meta became the first…