Media over QUIC: M&E's transport revolution has arrived

IBC

article here

For media companies preparing for the next decade of streaming, MoQ may be the most important standard they haven’t yet deployed.

For too long, the streaming industry has been pushing the limits of internet technologies never designed for the scale, interactivity, and immediacy of modern video. As live events grow larger and audiences more demanding, the cracks are showing. Enter Media over QUIC (MoQ), a transport protocol that promises to enhance both quality and latency without the need for specialised infrastructure. 

“Why MoQ, and why now?” asks Will Law, Chief Architect of the Edge Technology group at CDN provider Akamai. “Well, the answer to ‘Why now?’ is that we have a convergence of technologies, market pressures, and new expectations for real‑time digital experiences.” 

That convergence is around two protocols. The first is QUIC, originally developed in 2012 by Google, adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as the basis for HTTP/3, the next version of the hypertext transfer protocol, which is the foundation for data communication on the net. 

Then there’s WebTransport, which, as the name suggests, is a new transport layer for the web that is now supported across all major browsers. 

“It offers several advantages over traditional TCP [transmission control protocol] – the biggest being parallel streams of data,” Law outlines. “With a single connection, you can have 10, 20, or even 100 parallel streams, and they don’t interfere with one another. If one stream gets blocked, the others continue flowing. This lets us deliver media more efficiently than TCP ever could.” 

The IETF is baking QUIC and WebTransport into a new open standard. While MoQ is the name that has stuck, as Law emphasises, “it doesn’t have to be media… it’s payload agnostic.”

Non-media use cases that can take advantage of the technology run the gamut – ranging from gambling and betting to financial feeds, autonomous driving telemetry, and IoT sensors, all of which demand low latency, control, and reliability.

Akamai’s Law highlights AI as a major emerging use case. He says: “Imagine we want to use edge inference to translate what we’re saying in real time… MoQ is perfect for doing this. This was not a market opportunity we saw two years ago.” 

However, for the media industry, MoQ represents an opportunity to rethink how live video, interactivity, VR immersivity, and AI‑driven experiences flow across the internet. 

What problem does MoQ solve?  

The industry is still relying on HTTP, a protocol first published in 1997. Adaptive request–response patterns – such as HTTP live streaming (HLS), dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH), and common media application format (CMAF) – built on HTTP are undoubtedly improvements. However, they are rigid and slow to adapt. They are also fundamentally pull-based, which makes low-latency interactivity difficult.

WebRTC is excellent for real-time latency, but it can’t stretch to one-second latency, according to Law. “While HLS and DASH are very good at two or three seconds, they can’t reliably go lower and certainly can’t reach real-time performance.”

MoQ is designed to fill that gap. It offers what Law calls “tunable latency” transport that can operate anywhere from real time to a few seconds, while enabling bidirectional data flows.

“Today, quality of experience is a problem for live events for a lot of people,” says Damien Sterkers, Vice President (VP) of Product Marketing at streaming technology provider Broadpeak. “You get these big peaks of traffic, and most networks are not really sized for that. There must be some evolution at some point. MoQ not only promises lower latency but fewer rebuffering events and more efficient bandwidth usage, which are all essential for large-scale live delivery.”

For Gwendal Simon, Senior Director of Technology at Synamedia, the real breakthrough is the tech’s flexibility. 

“With MOQ, a player isn’t just a subscriber; it’s a publisher too,” he explains. “Any player that’s connected to a network can also publish data. That bidirectional communication unlocks a new class of experiences that HTTP simply can’t support.”

MoQ’s multi‑track publish/subscribe model means a publisher can expose multiple video, audio, and metadata tracks independently and for receivers to subscribe only to what they want. 

“This lets you create a personalised feed,” Simon says. “If you want to get rid of the broadcast concept where everyone gets the same flow, then MoQ is the answer.” 

Personalisation at scale 

Sports rights holders could be early beneficiaries. Today, a match might have one or two commentary feeds. MoQ could enable dozens. 

“In the US you already see ‘home’ and ‘away’ commentary,” Simon says. “In the future you’ll have tactical commentary for hardcore fans, casual commentary for newcomers, commentary in multiple languages and styles. You could easily end up with 8–10 English audio tracks alone.” 

Doing this today at scale is complex and expensive. “With MoQ, it’s part of the protocol,” he illustrates. 

Sterkers imagines similar possibilities: picture‑in‑picture commentary from a favourite YouTuber, or long‑promised but hard‑to‑deliver watch‑together experiences. 

Law predicts MoQ would enable real‑time fan interactivity such as instant voting and betting. “Even in-game micro-bets like ‘Who takes the free kick?’ can double or triple revenue for rights holders.” 

Rich, synchronised data feeds presenting biometrics, GPS, or player stats become possible. Multi‑camera, personalised feeds like Amazon’s X-Ray‑style Thursday Night Football experience would become accessible to anyone with MoQ. “You won’t have to use proprietary solutions,” says Law. 

Arguing that bandwidth constraints have held back innovation for years, Sterkers imagines that MoQ could finally unlock new fan experiences. 

“4K is very nice, but it’s pretty much impossible to have the capacity to do a big live event in 4K,” he says. “Until capacity and efficiency improve, innovations like multi‑angle viewing or HDR remain out of reach.” 

Boosting video calls 

Another intriguing possibility is the unification of streaming and video conferencing – two worlds that today operate on entirely separate stacks. 

“It’s possible to host a relay on the CDN side,” Simon explains. “So, WebEx, Zoom, and Teams could use it. Today, video conferencing and streaming are completely separate, but MOQ could unify them.” 

This could enable conferencing platforms to leverage global CDN infrastructure, improving scale and reliability. 

Standardisation and open-source momentum  

The IETF published draft 18 of the MOQ Transport spec in May and is “aggressively” pushing for the final spec to be formally published by September, Law says. 

“But stability is what matters, not publication,” he insists. “There are 12 independent relay implementations tracked by the IETF, all aiming for interoperability. When the spec stabilises, these relays will start working with each other… then we have reliability.” 

Synamedia expects MoQ to land first in primary distribution (broadcasters sending feeds to affiliates) around 2027. 

Consumer‑facing adoption is projected to come later, though some streaming solutions providers like Vindral and Nanocosmos are already deploying it. 

“They’ve built the player, the publisher and the network,” Law says. “They can just pick a draft and go with it, and they have gone to production already.” 

Law is also behind the recent launch of OpenMOQ, a consortium building MoQ open-source software that can be commercially deployed. The membership includes Cisco, Oracle, and YouTube, encoding vendors like Ateme, player companies like Bitmovin as well as Synamedia and Akamai. 

“Many people were sceptical in the beginning, but now there’s consensus that the benefits of MoQ are bigger than the constraints,” enthuses Simon. “Those who didn’t follow from the beginning are trying to catch up.” 

Sterkers believes major platforms will ultimately determine the pace. “Big actors have a lot to say,” he observes. “Google drove HTTP/2 adoption simply by enabling it on YouTube. If Google or Oracle deploy MoQ at scale, it’s going to change everything.” 

Likewise, expect MOQ to be a dominant technical theme at IBC in September with at least 30 booths demoing the tech – triple the number from IBC2025. 

At NAB, Broadpeak showcased a working MoQ relay interoperating with Shaka Player and Oracle OCI. “We showed less rebuffering, better latency and higher resolutions,” Sterkers says. 

It also introduced a “half‑relay” that accepts HTTP input and outputs MoQ, enabling gradual migration. 

“Migration needs to be step by step,” Sterkers says. “We’ve been working for so long with HTTP that it can seem impossible to switch to something else.” 

To be clear, MoQ isn’t proposed as a replacement for HLS/DASH – at least not immediately. Synamedia, for instance, has demonstrated a MoQ receiver that outputs MPEG‑TS. 

“That got attention,” says Simon, who expects a beta MoQ gateway and publisher ready for IBC. “It’s a bridge between old and new worlds.” 

He adds: “We can’t just wipe the infrastructure and deploy a new one based on MoQ. Backward compatibility, device support, and the need to transport existing formats (ie CMAF, MPEG-TS, SCTE‑35, DRM) mean the transition must be gradual.” 

Nonetheless, Sterkers expresses confidence. He says: “We’re not going to remain stuck in the technology of ’99 forever.” 

IBC2025’s Accelerator cohort delivered some of the most ambitious demonstrations yet, featuring AI-driven production workflows, a radical rethinking of ultra-low latency streaming, and even live private 5G networks flying in an ultralight aircraft. IBC365 hears from a handful of projects to learn about life after the show.