This paper discusses Agile Content’s new open-source Elastic Frame Protocol (EFP) and compares it with MPEG-2 Transport Stream (TS) with regards to protocol overhead, timeline and time stamps, error detection and recovery, (de)multiplexing, complex transport architectures, flexibility and use in modern packet-based transport architectures.

MPEG-2 TS has the advantage of being almost universally supported in broadcast media transport, but EFP was found to provide significantly lower overhead, 64-bit timestamps and much better possibilities to detect and correct packets that are delivered out of order.