This introduction is meant for beginners. This beginners' made easy tutorial is to give a brief introduction to RTP before one ventures into the long RFC documents. However, if you are a veteran please go through this short tutorial and suggest modifications.
What is RTP?
Real-time Transfer Protocol (RTP) provides end-to-end delivery services for data (such as interactive audio and video) with real-time characteristics.
It was primarily designed to support multiparty multimedia conferences. However it is used for different types of applications which we will go through shortly.
RTP is a standard specified in RFC 1889. More recent versions are RFC 3550 and RFC 3551. For an introduction like this we will stick to RFC1889