Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) is a special protocol used for live stream hosting plans where live events like video chats, conferences, training sessions, corporate meeting are broadcasted over the internet. This RTMP protocol was originally developed by Macromedia to stream the multimedia data between a Flash player and a server. In the server side, special software is required to run for accepting and serving the RTMP connections from clients. This is used in addition to web hosting where website files and scripts are hosted.

Adobe who developed this protocol has recently defined the three versions of the RTMP protocol. They are the plain protocol, RTMPT and RTMPS. The first version of the RTMP protocol uses the port number 1935 by default and it works on the top of TCP. The second is the RTMPT which is encapsulated within HTTP requests to traverse firewalls. RTMPS is RTMPT over a secure SSL connection using HTTPS.

The operation of RMTP is as follows: The RMTP protocol splits the video data into 128 bytes and other data into 64 bytes. Fragments from different streams may then be interleaved and multiplexed over a single connection at the packet level. This RMTP protocol than defines difference channels each for video data, audio data, control messages, request, and response. The id of the channel is then generated and the data is then encoded and sent. The SSL encryption technique or RTMPE technique is used during RMTP session to encrypt the data.