The not insignificant coverage of Media over QUIC (MoQ) on the NAB 2026 showfloor confirmed that this is a technology now firmly in the ascendancy. The open standard protocol, developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), aims to enable high-performance, low-latency ingest and distribution applications.
According to the IETF project data tracker, the protocol will support: one or more media formats; an interoperable way to indicate the media and the media format being sent; rare adaptation strategies based on changing codec rates, media encoding/qualities or other mechanisms; and cache-friendly media mechanisms. Media is mapped onto underlying QUIC mechanisms (QUIC streams and/or QUIC diagrams) and can be deployed over raw QUIC or WebTransport.
The end-result, states Cloudflare on its blog, “combines the low-latency interactivity of WebRTC, the scalability of HLS/DASH, and the simplicity of a single architecture, all built on a modern transport layer.” Of course, the market has hardly been lacking in new media protocols during the past decade, so it only seems reasonable to ask its early enthusiasts about the aspects that earmark MoQ as ‘one to watch’.
Solving a trilemma
Stefan Lederer, co-founder and co-CEO of Bitmovin, notes that QUIC had “been on our radar for a long time”, well in advance of the IETF MoQT working group that formally launched in 2022. “What changed was the ecosystem around it. When you see Akamai, Cloudflare, and Oracle actively shaping the working group, and when the publish/subscribe architecture they settled on maps almost perfectly to how CDN fan-out works at scale, it stops being a research curiosity and starts looking like a genuine protocol inflection point. That shift happened for us around 2023, and we have been building towards it since.”
As such, MoQ’s ‘core premise’ is easy to define, indicates Lederer: “Sub-second latency at broadcast scale, without the infrastructure complexity that has made achieving both simultaneously so painful until now. With HLS and DASH you get scale but accept seconds of delay. With WebRTC you get the latency, but managing it at millions of concurrent viewers is genuinely hard. MoQ is designed from the ground up to solve that trilemma.”
Gwendal Simon, senior director of technology, video network at Synamedia, highlights another primary benefit. “Along with the low latency, what’s very interesting with MoQ is the multi-track publish/subscribe paradigm. In MoQ the publisher can expose as many tracks as it wants, so it can expose video and audio tracks, but with multiple audio tracks [for each item of content], which is obviously very good for translation.”
Cullen Jennings is CTO for audio/video collaboration and AI at Cisco, which, along with Synamedia, Akamai, CDN77, RED and YouTube, is a founder member of the OpenMoQ Software Consortium focusing on advancing MoQ-based technology through open-source software. He says that integral to MoQ is its “relay-and-caching model [that] can reduce latency, improve recovery from packet loss, and enable efficient fan-out to many users without requiring the same level of duplicated delivery.”
More specifically, MoQ’s employment of media relays throughout the transport chain makes it easier to increase media quality. “When a packet is lost on your Wi-Fi network, the client can ask the Wi-Fi Access Point to resend it instead of going all the way back to the cloud,” says Jennings. “The media simply isn’t having to travel as far as it once did. On the other end, if one is installed in a cloud data centre right next to a media server node, it can help that media server scale out in a cost-efficient way.”
“The benefit is not only improved speed, but also a more coordinated and predictable delivery chain,” adds Dustin Encelewski, principal product manager, OCI Media Services, Oracle. “Streams start faster, remain more stable under load, and scale more effectively during peak events. It also reduces the need for complex, bespoke integrations.”
Live streaming potential
There is general agreement that MoQ’s adoption will be spearheaded by applications where low-latency is at a particular premium, such as live streaming and collaboration.
For Lederer, live sport is an obvious example of where MoQ would be of benefit. “The second-screen spoiler problem is real and expensive for rights holders, and they know it. That drives genuine urgency to invest. Live betting is similar because latency there is not just about experience, it is about product integrity.”
MoQ also opens the doors to more advanced and flexible working experiences, says Encelewski. “Examples include multi-camera angles, dynamic overlays, and increasingly personalised streams,” he continues. “By modernising live transport, broadcasters and streaming platforms can deliver richer and more interactive experiences that leverage the expanded capabilities of digital distribution.”
Lederer adds: “I think the less obvious opportunity is contribution and syndication. The properties that make MoQ good for last-mile delivery—reliable transport over lossy networks, efficient multiplexing, a relay-friendly object model—are equally valuable in the professional distribution chain. It tends to get overlooked because everyone focuses on the consumer playback side first, but it could matter just as much.”
MoQ could be particularly promising for interactive live experiences such as sports, gaming, esports and creator platforms where audience participation is key. But in the long term, says Jennings, its greatest potential could transcend media applications because MoQ “creates a fundamental tool for building distributed internet protocols: a high-speed, flexible pub/sub bus. This is higher in speed than any pub/sub bus out there. Most were meant for dealing with the scale of, say, instant messaging. You can send video over MoQ and it works fine. [Therefore] I believe that will turn into an incredibly useful architectural tool.”
The IETF project tracker indicates that key documentation pertaining to MoQ could start to be published from December 2026 onwards. In the meantime, PoCs are in progress, and some companies are already supporting MoQ. For example, Bitmovin’s Player Web X now supports MoQ playback natively and was demonstrated with Cloudflare at NAB 2026. The technology is also described as a “foundational element” of Oracle Video Edge. Meanwhile, there is an acute awareness of the need to maintain alignment between vendors and developers if MoQ is to realise its full potential.
“Interoperability has to come first,” says Lederer. “The spec is still in draft and the industry needs a real plugfest moment—something like the early HLS interop work, where you stress-test multi-vendor implementations at scale and find out what actually breaks. Beyond that, the areas I watch closely are namespace and catalogue management, because publishers and CDNs need a consistent model for organising and discovering streams, and browser support.
“Longer term, I hope MoQ becomes the single transport layer for both live and on-demand. The fragmentation between contribution protocols, distribution protocols and playback protocols adds real cost and complexity for every media company we work with. MoQ has a credible shot at simplifying that significantly.”
- This article appears in the latest issue of TVBEurope, available to download free here
