Resounding Support for MOQ Liftoff Fuels Hopes Next-Gen Streaming Might Finally Fly
By Fred Dawson
Global consensus on a next-gen video streaming protocol supporting real-time connectivity at mass scales appears to be closer than ever with multiple implementations of the MOQ Transport standard now underway.
The recent NAB Show in Las Vegas left no doubt that pent-up demand for sub-second synchronized delivery of streamed payloads has brought major players in the M&E sector to the brink of forging a path beyond the prevailing unidirectional latency-prone streaming infrastructure. That’s the case even though reliance on MOQ requires a major transformation in content delivery networks along with adoption of new software platforms governing packaging and playback of streamed payloads.
While proprietary real-time streaming systems supporting video conferencing and a host of other applications have been around for several years, MOQ is meant to satisfy the need for a standardized, ubiquitously available two-way superhighway over which video flows in any direction at any scale with latencies attuned to specific use-case requirements. That’s why Red5, a successful provider of a highly scalable WebRTC-based streaming platform, is throwing its weight behind MOQ, said Red5 CEO and co-founder Chris Allen.
“WebRTC was designed as a peer-to-peer protocol, which means there’s no standard for scaling the way we do by building out clustered cloud resources,” Allen said. “MOQ was designed from the get-go as a scalable broadcast technology for the internet, which we believe will accelerate adoption of next-generation streaming.”
The Big Forklift Ahead
The foundational set of MOQ specifications, known as MOQ Transport (MOQT), marks an incompatible break with conventional streaming modes like HLS and MPEG DASH that are based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). As a so-called connectionless platform, MOQT employs a simple publish/subscribe approach to streaming by signaling the start and end points of a session while avoiding the thousands of request/response exchanges that transpire between clients and servers in HTTP streaming.
Critically, the model supports synchronized conveyance of payload elements in individual tracks using a messaging system in the packet headers that allows operators to instantaneously switch among them to delivery personalized user experiences. But, of course, such capabilities require all new approaches not only at the transport level but at the software-managed media layer where everything down to the approaches to adaptive bitrate streaming and DRM out to advanced applications like dynamic advertising and forensic watermarking has to be rewritten.
The question is whether MOQ will take hold with significant commercial clout when the anticipated completion of the transport standard later this year allows the industry to move beyond the test phase now in sway across multiple CDNs. The big news mid-2026 is the scale of activity that’s been triggered by what the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) teams pursuing the MOQ standard components have accomplished so far, especially at the transport level where the discussion now revolves around MOQT Version 17.
“There’s a buzz and excitement in the air about MOQ we’ve never seen before,” said Will Law, chief architect for the cloud technology group at Akamai and a leader in the IETF MOQ initiative. “There’s still a lot to do, but I think we’re on track to complete the majority of the specifications fairly soon.” He cited the forthcoming late July meeting in Vienna as the likely venue for resolving most if not all the remaining issues associated with nailing down the MOQT specs.
The enthusiasm for MOQ stems from the fact that its designers have forged a path to real-time streaming that not only does away with the complexities of conventional streaming modes like HLS and MPEG DASH that are based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)-based streaming modes like HLS and MPEG DASH. With the multi-track, multi-directional approach to vertically segmenting streams, it opens the door to far more functionality, including support for in-session video communications among users.
Moreover, the new standard provides a way to automatically tune end-to-end latencies to whatever levels meet user requirements, including real-time 200-400ms latencies that are imperceptible to humans as well as what Law calls “interactive live” at 2 seconds for use in sports betting, online casino gambling, banking and similar applications and “conservative live” supporting ironclad HD, 4K, and, eventually, 8K quality persistency at 5 seconds.
With decoding and other device rendering processes managed through leading browsers, MOQ in most instances doesn’t require client plug-in software. And depending on how MOQ-ready CDNs are designed, MOQ can also support recording live content for short-term replay and catchup and long-term storage for VOD archives and cloud DVR applications. “VOD just means my cache is big enough to hold stuff that was live a while ago,” Law says.
Paralleling MOQT development, there are other initiatives within IETF and through the closely affiliated ad hoc organization known as the OpenMOQ Software Consortium that are aimed at creating a practical operating environment for the transport protocol. They include media layer streaming formats emerging from IETF and other sources and multiple contributions of client player software, including a new open-source template developed by Red5 and endorsed by the consortium.
Multiple Providers Create a Fledgling MOQT Ecosystem
Now is a good time to be getting MOQ-based services underway, Law said, noting that remaining issues, while plentiful, don’t threaten to disrupt the core MOQT architecture in the soon-to-be locked-down version that will be distributed in the request-for-comments (RFC) phase of the IETF standardization process. In fact, he added, there are some users who have begun commercial services with Version 7, which is the MOQT platform Swedish CDN operator Vindral put into operation a year ago. “The final version will make things easier,” he said, “but that’s not to say you can’t go earlier.”
Users worldwide are taking advantage of the options now available from Vindral and many other suppliers, including CDN operators Broadpeak, CacheFly, Cloudflare and CDN77 as well as cloud compute platform providers Akamai, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Many of these efforts involve partnerships with media layer specialists.
For example, CacheFly is teamed with Red5 in the use of the latter’s Experience Delivery Network (XDN) architecture to orchestrate cloud resources for ingestion, transcoding, and instantiating MOQ relays while providing customers access to the Red5 Playa player, Video Packager and a wide range of application-specific open-source toolsets. In their demo at the CacheFly booth the companies showed that streams ingested onto the modified CDN can be delivered via MOQ or HTTP-based protocols like HLS and LL-HLS depending on use-case performance requirements.
Many demos at the NAB Show involved such partnerships and the interoperability of various MOQ implementations. In addition, there were multiple displays focused on specific solutions that can be used with MOQ from streaming technology suppliers like Bitmovin, Synamedia, Ateme, Norsk Media, Nomad Media, Red5, EZDRM, Wowza, Jeket, Caton and others, frequently with the assistance of engineering groups like Qualabs and Fraunhofer FOKUS.
One demonstration of MOQ interoperability occurred at several vendor booths with connectivity provided by Cloudflare and Broadpeak CDNs utilizing the new MOQ-optimized Oracle Video @ Edge (OVE) service running on the OCI global cloud compute platform under management of OCI Media Services. OCI Media Services’ use of OVE is Oracle’s initial stab at creating architecture aligning ingestion, transport, playback and telemetry into a single fabric, much as Red5 has done for MOQ deployments that are now underway with CacheFly and anticipated for additional CDN alignments in the future.
The entry point in the joint NAB demo with OVE was provided by Ateme’s encoding platform with the packaging contribution to the workflow on display at Broadpeak’s booth. The packaged content was ingested into Broadpeak’s CDN serving partner ISPs and the global CDN operated by Cloudflare. Playback for the demo was supported by Bitmovin’s latest version of its popular Web SDK player platform, which has been completely re-architected and branded Player Web X.
“We have an array of features we enable, and each is treated as an individual plug-in,” said Bitmovin product manager Jacob Arends, who described Player X as the latest, completely rebuilt version of its popular Web X player. “From a player [configuration] perspective there’s not much more to it than that,” but with MOQ playback departing from the HTTP norms, “it takes a lot of heavy lifting on the cloud side.”
While not entirely comporting with the OpenMOQ open-source mandate, Player Web X is “very akin to an open-source,” Arends said, noting that the consortium mandate leaves room for use of proprietary players or other extensions that members bring to the table. “We’ve built a high-performance small core, and everything else is its own plugin,” he explained.
Cloudflare’s presence was widely felt at NAB. Currently supporting MOQ testing with an upgrade from draft 14 to draft 16 of the emerging standard, the company has taken a leading role in MOQ CDN transport. The initiative is promoting interoperability with a wide range of MOQ client players and their attendant streaming formats.
Taking a different tack with MOQ-related demos, Ant Media has introduced a MOQ-Lite plug-in for its Ant Media Server, which it demonstrated in side-by-side comparisons with its long-standing AMS support for real-time interactive streaming via WebRTC. The vendor drew much interest in the demo, which highlighted the vendor’s long-standing developer-oriented approach to self-managed real-time streaming, in contrast to the Auto-Managed Live Streaming Service it announced over a year ago with a beta launch on AWS. It has said little about the service since, other than to acknowledge on its website that users are encountering problems with “AWS errors.”
There were also impressive demonstrations of MOQ intiatives by OpenMOQ Consortium member Synamedia and the cloud-native production workflow provider Norsk Media on the B2B production and playout sides of live broadcast operations. In this domain MOQ is gaining interest as a real-time alternative to the widely used SRT playout transport option, which has lost favor in many quarters owing to problems with buffering and other issues.
While much of the focus on MOQ has to do with overcoming the limitations of conventional B2C streaming, the protocol also needs to be accommodated in post-production playouts to producers’ broadcast and OTT affiliates, noted Gwendal Simon, senior director for video network technology at Synamedia. “We’re bringing MOQ into our Quortex PowerVu multitrack contribution management system,” Simon said.
Quortex PowerVu makes it possible for publishers to deliver content to affiliates via the real-time publish/subscribe model supported by MOQ as well as via HLS and DASH streams or traditional MPEG TV channels. Norsk’s demo linked into Cloudflare’s MOQ relay network to show how MOQ fully integrated with the cloud-native Norsk Studio production framework facilitates real-time previews of dispersed technicians’ input on Studio workflows as well as real-time playout to producers’ affiliates.
Flourishing Innovation at the MOQ Media Layer
Red5 appeared to be much further along than most with the heavy lifting that’s required at the media layer riding on MOQT. Amazon Prime principal product manager Nicolas Weil gave this a nod in a pre-show blog “Tracking MOQ in the Wild,” where he pointed to Red5 partner Nomad Media’s booth as the place for visitors to start in witnessing the full scope of MOQ interoperability and functionality.
Nomad’s booth was one location, along with the AWS and CacheFly booths, where Red5 highlighted its MOQ player and relay solutions working in open-source harmony with other OpenMOQ Consortium members’ platforms. Notably, its ability to ingest live content into the MOQ Transport system from feeds delivered over any of the commonly used protocols, including RTMP, RTSP, SRT, Zixi, WebRTC, HLS and Low-Latency HLS, showed broadcasters they can take advantage of MOQ in sports and other live productions without disrupting existing operations.
The Nomad booth demos also highlighted the use of some of Red5’s TrueTime Solutions in XDN deployments on the backend as well as distribution side of operations, including anywhere MOQ is in play. For example, it showed how its TrueTime MultiView application synchronizing multi-camera streams, real-time mixing, and monitoring workflows can be used on both fronts. The solution can facilitate real-time decision-making and operational awareness enhanced by AI-powered object detection and quality assurance in dispersed production workflows, and it brings a new level of user experience to recipients of live-streamed sports and other content.
Red5 also touted its TrueTime Meetings video conferencing solution as a way to bring real-time interactive video communications directly into MOQ and other live streaming workflows wherever they occur. Red5 officials noted that seamless crossover from MOQ streaming to TrueTime Meetings opens an immediate path to a new realm of applications that otherwise might take a long time to develop waiting for the multi-directional video capabilities of MOQ to mature.
In addition, they pointed to displays of XDN versatility at both the Nomad and AWS booths that were running side-by-side closed-network comparisons of live camera feeds delivered from the show floor over MOQ, WebRTC, Low-Latency HLS and HLS with metrics comparing latency and performance in real time. AWS, which sources said is thinking through its approaches to supporting MOQ, declined to comment on where it’s going with MOQ.
In tandem with all of this, the OpenMOQ Software Consortium, whose founding members include Akamai, CDN77, Cisco, Red5, Synamedia and YouTube, has been coordinating key steps at the media layer that are essential to bringing use cases to life over MOQT infrastructure. The consortium is serving as an informal conduit for a bevy of independently developed MOQ media client players that can be used with streaming formats, including the IETF’s MOQ Streaming Format (MSF) and CMAF-enhanced version of MSF (CMSF) as well as others that are emerging as MOQ-compliant formats.
Indeed, according to Law, there’s no limit to the variety of streaming formats that can be devised for MOQ instances. That’s because the MOQ Media Layer is decoupled from the Transport Layer, which allows CDN operators to offer MOQ Transport as a service while freeing their customers to configure streaming formats for any use cases they want to support.
Law noted this opens opportunities not only for streaming formats targeting mass market applications but for niche formats as well, including video-free versions such as might be needed for chat services, autonomous vehicle operations, industrial IoT or smart city management. “I’m working with a company that wants to use AI to translate audio on the fly,” he said. “With its support for parallel tracks operating in sync both ways, MOQ Transport is very good for that.”
In the case of mass market video streaming applications, MOQ Media Layer-compatible streaming formats will define how the streamed A/V and ancillary elements conveying captioning, personalized and commonly shared features and ads, and other applications are compressed, encrypted and packaged for playback by media players running on receiving devices. IETF is developing a two-pronged standard for one such streaming format, formerly encapsulated as a single format called the WARP Streaming Format but now divided to accommodate two versions for use with and without the package framing known as Common Media Application Format (CMAF).
The different approaches to CMAF are the only thing that distinguishes what’s now known as MOQ Streaming Format (MSF) from the version dubbed CMSF, where the “C” stands for CMAF. Both versions are meant to provide an IETF-standardized version of a MOQ streaming format that can support the preponderance of use cases that will be flowing over MOQ Transport.
As described by the IETF’s MOQ Working Group, MSF targets real-time and interactive levels of live payloads as well as VOD content by using the IETF’s Low Overhead Media Container (LOC) protocol as a light-weight approach to stream-layer packaging that aligns with media formats using WebCodecs, which is a standard defining interfaces with encoders and decoders used in internet communications. CMSF adds CMAF as an optional alternative to relying on LOC.
Both define how what’s known as a catalog communicates information describing publishers’ output, specifying:
how content should be packaged, encrypted and signaled;
the use of latencies and the level of prioritization accorded real-time transmissions;
details pertaining to broadcast workflows and how they’re initiated and terminated, and
the parameters directing devices’ execution of ABR profile switching.
As to what other MOQ streaming formats might be in the offing, much will be revealed as participants in the development process introduce media players tailored to their constituents’ needs. The good news is that CDN operators can confidently implement infrastructure for testing MOQ applications at the transport level knowing that users will have access to MOQ media players that can execute playback of their payloads in an open-source, interoperable environment that maximizes their market reach.
Chris Allen, CEO & Co-Founder, Red5